So, for the first time in my Linux career of nigh on 25 years now, I dd’d my setup to utter destruction.
I had if and of the wrong way round.
Reinstalling EOS took less than 5 minutes.
I was up and running with all bells and whistles in less than 10 minutes.
Glad to be back.
I’ve managed to get builds complete in 20 mins flat now (fstab mounts, aliases, data restore and fully functional). It’s a useful skill to have to know your break-fix routine! 
Having said that, it’s been a few years now since EOS has completely broken on me..
Cliché: there is a first time for everything 
It’s not for nothing dd is called “widowmaker”. 
Or was it something else? 
Anyways, glad your system is back again!
Yeah, if you do it often enough, you can get really quick about it ;0 (I know this, though I haven’t dd’d a disk partition unintentionally for oh…at least 365 days with no accidents).
Yeah, first thing l did, was populate fstab (to get to my data), install my password manager, private VPN and email client. The most time was spent adding 5 email accounts to the email client.
I heard dd stood for: disk destroyer.
Right that was it: dd >> Disk Destroyer 
However “widowmaker” is not that far off since a sudden loss of all data on a disk may provoke fatal heart attack
Note, I wish neither happen to any user 
Used to hate this, - then I discovered the joy of just replicating the .thunderbird folder (assuming that you’re using it). Not sure if other mail clients can be done in the same way.
Thanks for the tip. I may end up using TB, but first want to try kmail again; I like the Kontact suite of which it is a component.
I say “try again” because, so far, Kmail and korganizer start giving problems after a while. (Mostly due, I think, to the complexitiy of akonadi, kwallet and the authentication for google/gmail.)
I haven’t used kmail in several years, but back then…I found it issue prone as well, driving me back then to Thunderbird. I wanted to like it ;0
same here.
I heard it was Data Destroyer because the disk is fine, it’s the data that’s gone
From almost a decade of trying, all I can say is yeah.. good luck..
Yes, that’s one I’ve come across as well. Also: Data Dump, Data Definition (as in IBM JCL) - but you are right: in my case the data was destroyed, not the disk.