3. Algorithm

GNU ddrescue manages efficiently the status of the rescue in progress and tries to rescue the good parts first, maximizing the amount of data finally recovered from a failing drive.

The standard dd utility can be used to save data from a failing drive, but it reads the data secuentially, which may wear out the drive without rescuing anything if the errors are at the beginning of the drive.

Other programs switch to small size reads when they find errors, but this is a bad idea because it means spending more time at error areas, damaging the surface, the heads and the drive mechanics, instead of getting out of them as fast as possible. This behavior reduces the chances of rescuing the remaining good data.

The algorithm of ddrescue is as follows (the user may interrupt the process at any point, but be aware that a bad drive can block ddrescue for a long time until the kernel gives up):

1) Optionally read a logfile describing the status of a multi-part or previously interrupted rescue. If no logfile is specified or is empty or does not exist, mark all the rescue domain as non-tried.

2) Read the non-tried parts of the input file, marking the failed blocks as non-trimmed and skipping beyond them, until all the rescue domain is tried. Only non-tried areas are read in large blocks. Trimming, splitting and retrying are done sector by sector. Each sector is tried at most two times; the first in this step as part of a large block read, the second in one of the steps below as a single sector read.

3) Read backwards one sector at a time the non-trimmed blocks, until a bad sector is found. For each non-trimmed block, mark the bad sector found as bad-sector and mark the rest of that block as non-split.

4) Read forwards one sector at a time the non-split blocks, marking the bad sectors found as bad-sector. After a number of consecutive bad sectors is found in a block large enough, the block is split by half and the reading continues on the second half. This recursively splits the largest failed blocks without producing a logfile too large.

5) Optionally try to read again the bad sectors until the specified number of retries is reached.

6) Optionally write a logfile for later use.

Note that as ddrescue splits the failed blocks, making them smaller, the total error size may diminish while the number of errors increases.

The logfile is periodically saved to disc, as well as when ddrescue finishes or is interrupted. So in case of a crash you can resume the rescue with little recopying.

Also, the same logfile can be used for multiple commands that copy different areas of the input file, and for multiple recovery attempts over different subsets. See this example:

Rescue the most important part of the disc first.

ddrescue -i0 -s50M /dev/hdc hdimage logfile
ddrescue -i0 -s1M -d -r3 /dev/hdc hdimage logfile

Then rescue some key disc areas.

ddrescue -i30G -s10G /dev/hdc hdimage logfile
ddrescue -i230G -s5G /dev/hdc hdimage logfile

Now rescue the rest (does not recopy what is already done).

ddrescue /dev/hdc hdimage logfile
ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/hdc hdimage logfile