I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.
This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.
I’m currently backing up my /dev folder to my unlimited cloud storage. The backup of the file
/dev/random
is running since two weeks.That’s silly. You should compress it before uploading.
No wonder. That file is super slow to transfer for some reason. but wait till you get to /dev/urandom. That file hat TBs to transfer at whatever pipe you can throw at it…
Cool, so I learned something new today. Don’t run
cat /dev/random
Why not try /dev/urandom?
😹
Ya know, if not for the other person’s comment, I might have been gullible enough to try this…
I’m guessing this is a joke, right?
/dev/random and other “files” in /dev are not really files, they are interfaces which van be used to interact with virtual or hardware devices. /dev/random spits out cryptographically secure random data. Another example is /dev/zero, which spits out only zero bytes.
Both are infinite.
Not all “files” in /dev are infinite, for example hard drives can (depending on which technology they use) be accessed under /dev/sda /dev/sdb and so on.
I’m aware of that. I was quite sure the author was joking, with the slightest bit of concern of them actually making the mistake.