ddrescue 1.5 released [LWN.net]

Stable version 1.5 of ddrescue has been announced. "GNU ddrescue copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. The basic operation of ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don't have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc."

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ddrescue 1.5 released

Posted Jul 12, 2007 17:26 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

This is an incredibly useful tool, and a great advert for the strengths of open source - I used it last year to recover virtually all blocks on a failing disk on a Windows PC. Unlike the similarly named dd_rescue, the GNU ddrescue tool is implemented in C, so it is much faster when it has to retry successively closer to a failed area, when maximising the amount of recovered data.

It should really be bundled with every Linux recovery disk out there, including the excellent SystemRescueCD which works on both PCs and PowerPC Macs.

What the world really needs is an open source SpinRite, but ddrescue is generally a safer approach, with SpinRite being reserved for true emergencies when a spare hard disk is not available. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite for some discussion of both tools.

ddrescue 1.5 released

Posted Jul 12, 2007 17:34 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

And it's now GPLv3...