There's a specific reason why some called it fake: as adviced by others, Masarla ran the dd command to save the raw content of the disks, in case the recovery process screws up somehow.
He inverted the `if` and `of` arguments. You'd expect him to pay attention, after what happens. This doesn't pass the smell test for some.
Then again, you'd also expect him to be quite stressed out. That does make that mistake a bit more likely.
Possibly, but the dd command does have more affordances than say, ld. `if` and `of` do stand for input file and output file, and it's harder to swap named arguments than positional arguments.
He could have swapped arguments like `/dev/sdc` and `/dev/sde` though…
He inverted the `if` and `of` arguments. You'd expect him to pay attention, after what happens. This doesn't pass the smell test for some.
Then again, you'd also expect him to be quite stressed out. That does make that mistake a bit more likely.