GNU's ddrescue For Disk Recovery Updated With New Options

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU's ddrescue For Disk Recovery Updated With New Options

GNU ddrescue continues work on being a capable data recovery tool for copying data from a file or block device to another, doing more than just the dd command. GNU ddrescue 1.22 was released over the weekend as the newest version of this tool...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-ddrescue-1.22

[c117152]

The regular dd doesn't verify reads or writes* so unless you happen to be duping data from one ECC RAM temp dir to the next, you should be using ddrescue. Personally, I had hard drives, flash drives and sd cards all failing under windows and linux, successfully dupe 100% with ddrescue.

I use large buffers (that match the ones found on the drives) and over 4 retries since it's both faster and reduces drive wear & tear.

Another important tip is to open the PC case and aim a big air vent at the drive and board. Unless it's a rack-mount, prolonged read\write operations build up temperature way beyond what the average PC is capable of venting. Also useful when reinstalling windows on a crappy OEM box that's under-vented since the factory wrote the images to the drives using a dedicate machine and physically installed the drive in the box only after the image was already written.

* the software people say it should be done by the kernel. the kernel people say it should be done by the hardware... The fact kernel devs are targeting high reliability server hardware with parity and redundancies while only looking at performance metrics also doesn't help...