Yesterday I have a problem with restoring some data from a USB drive. Flash drive was not recognised as default in Windows and other Unix systems by default. Below is a short note that can be useful while dealing with similar problems.

Locate flash drive

ls /dev/disk/by-id

To back up your flash drive to an image file compressed with ZIP in a single command, use

sudo dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/YOUR_FLASH_DRIVE status=progress | gzip -c > /home/USERNAME/backups/BACKUP_NAME.img.gz

To restore the backup, you’ll have to reverse the two commands’ sequence and define your flash drive as the output device

sudo gzip -c /home/USERNAME/backups/BACKUP_NAME.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/disk/by-id/YOUR_FLASH_DRIVE status=progress

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