ddrescue: No relation to the aforementioned dd

I’ve never used ddrescue, and I count myself among the lucky for that. In the same vein, I doubt I could show much in a screenshot that would be instructive.

The few times I’ve run into complete disk failures, I had sufficient backups to make ddrescue more work than it would be worth.

What I’ve learned about ddrescue makes it quite impressive though. For one thing, the program is less than 10 years old, which makes it a baby by most Linux standards.

ddrescue is also apparently designed to do the least additional damage to a malfunctioning drive; how exactly that works is a mystery.

But what I liked most was the idea you could run it repetitively without the chance of losing data. As I understand it, rather than writing zeros where data can’t be recovered, a later pass might add information that was found. I’ve probably explained it badly; the home page does better.

Like I said, I’ve never had the occasion to use ddrescue and I hope that’s always the case. On the other hand, I have a strange wish that I did have a crippled drive, just so I could try it out. 😐