balenaEtcher

Writes an image to removable media, with validation, and without letting you pick the wrong disk.

What it does

Etcher takes an image (.iso, .img, .dmg, compressed archives) and writes it to a selected removable device, verifying the result afterwards. It refuses to list internal drives by default, which is the feature — a mistyped dd target destroys the system disk, and this cannot.

For a homelab it is the step before every Raspberry Pi, Proxmox host and router flash.

Notes

Electron-based and heavier than the job warrants, but the guard rails justify it.
The command-line equivalent, for when you are certain:

diskutil list                       # identify the disk, carefully
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
sudo dd if=image.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=4m status=progress

With dd there is no confirmation and no undo — the wrong of= target overwrites whatever is there, including your startup disk. Verify the identifier with diskutil list immediately before running it, or use Etcher and let it refuse for you.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
Raspberry Pi Imager	Open source	Better for Pi work: it writes Wi-Fi and SSH settings into the image
Ventoy	Open source	One USB stick that boots many ISOs, no reflashing between them
`dd`	Built in	Already installed, no guard rails whatsoever
UNetbootin	Open source	Older, still works, mainly for Linux installers