The command dd is used to copy blocks of information from hard drives. Unfortunately it doesn't display information about the progress of the operation by default.

For that there is a way to obtain the progress information just sending a signal USR1 to the process.

As an example, if we are running the following backup:

dd if=/media/backup/mobile_sep2010.dd of=/dev/sdb1

We need to obtain the process PID

ps -e | grep dd
30767 pts/0 00:00:42 dd

And then send the USR1 signal to it:

kill -USR1 30767

Finally, in the console where we are running the process dd we will see the information:

3548345+0 records in
3548345+0 records out
1816752640 bytes (1.8 GB) copied, 1409.51 s, 1.3 MB/s