On 02/13/2014 03:40 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
"Radule Šoškić"
wrote: On 02/12/2014 12:23 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2014-02-12 11:14, Radule Šoškić wrote:
Various ddrescue (and other *rescue) programs are meant mainly for rescuing deleted or otherwise lost data -- they are very useful in carving artifacts of lost files and try to recover them into whole files. They act as a sort of digital forensic tools.
No, absolutely not. You are confusing tools.
"No"? --Hmm, might apply to some of the tools in the broad group... "Aboslutely not"? --This I think is a bit of an overstatement...
Radule,
You might not like how *rescue work, but they are very focused tools designed to work with failing disks. Personally I use ewfacquire from libewf-tools as my first choice of tools for backing up a drive with minimal hardware failures.
Ewfacquire defaults to trying each read twice before moving on. It also allows you to specify a block size of say 64KB for working parts of the drive, but step down to a single sector on failing sections. I always make "images". Those can be restored to a new drive.
Ewfacquire does not do things like reverse reads, nor does it log progress such that future runs can work only on the failing sections of the drive. Gnu_ddrescue can do both of those. Thus if a drive has more than a couple bad sectors, I would use gnu_ddrescue instead.
Fyi: I make my living doing computer forensics and I can assure you *rescue have nothing to do with data carving.
Greg
Uh, oh. I already had a feeling that something went wrong with my post, after reading Mr. Carlos' reactions. Now, after reading yours, I went to reread my first post again. And the whole thread. I think I see now what happened. My intention was just to suggest two simple things: -- avoid a lot of re-reads on hdd and choose the tool that gives you good control on number of retries. -- even a simple general purpose copy tool might help better than a super-power specialized forensics tool if the latter defaults to a hard-coded high max_no_of_retries. But, while addressing the other class ot tools as a bunch, I used terms "various ddrescue" and "*rescue", which was obviously unfortunate choice. It was meant to mean: "various '*' tools exist around that are built for purpose of rescuing deleted and lost files -- dont use them..." But it happened that my random pick of terms matched the exact names of real existing tools. I got that only after reading the other branch of the thread. Foreign languages. The wrong wording happens from time to time. But this was exact hitting the extreme opposite of the intended. Not funny. R.Soskic -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org