What I meant was that using dd to take format/backup disks is just way too dangerous for human beings. The prospect of losing your precious data even once in your lifetime is too expensive a cost for the questionable benefit of feeling cool about doing backups by running a command on the terminal. Just use a gui tool for writing to physical disks. The additional visual feedback that a gui can provide is absolutely essential for human beings performing such a dangerous operation.
At this point recommending dd really is kind of telling the other person to go fuck themselves. It doesn't even follow the arg format of every other unix command. I had to double check to see if anyone fixed that in the interim. Nope, still a=b syntax, rather than -i device1 -o device2.
That really should be a giant clue that it shouldn't be used by anyone, for any reason. "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."
