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Saturday, October 30, 2010

dd_rescue

I found this App in my Fedora 13 Repo's...

dd_rescue

Like dd, dd_rescue does copy data from one file or block device to another. You can specify file positions (called seek and Skip in dd). There are several differences:

dd_rescue does not provide character conversions.
The command syntax is different. Call dd_rescue -h.
dd_rescue does not abort on errors on the input file, unless you specify a maximum error number. Then dd_rescue will abort when this number is reached.
dd_rescue does not truncate the output file, unless asked to.
You can tell dd_rescue to start from the end of a file and move bcakwards.
It uses two block sizes, a large (soft) block size and a small (hard) block size. In case of errors, the size falls back to the small one and is promoted again after a while without errors.
It does not (yet) support non-seekable in- or output.

Purpose of dd_rescue

The latter three features make it suitable for rescuing data from a medium with errors, i.e. a hard disk with some bad sectors.
Why?

Imagine, one of your partitions is crashed, and as there are some hard errors, you don't want to write to this hard disk any more. Just getting all the data off it and retiring it seems to be suitable. However, you can't access the files, as the file system is damaged.
Now, you want to copy the whole partition into a file. You burn it on CD-Rom, just to never lose it again. You can setup a loop device, and repair (fsck) it and hopefully are able to mount it.
Copying this partition with normal Un*x tools like cat or dd will fail, as those tools abort on error. dd_rescue instead will try to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors. The output file naturally will have holes in it, of course. You can write a log file, to see, where all these errors are located.
The data rate drops very low, when errors are encountered. If you interrupt the process of copying, you don't lose anything. You can just continue at any position later. The output file will just be filled in further and not truncated as with other Un*x tools.
If you have one spot of bad sectors within the partition, it might be a good idea, to approach this spot from both sides. Reverse direction copy is your friend.
The two block sizes are a performance optimization. Large block sizes result in superior performance, but in case of errors, you want to try to salvage every single sector. So hardbs is best be set to the hardware sector size (most often 512 bytes) and softbs to a large value, such as the default 16k.

More info can be found in the README file included in the package.

Just one note: It does work. I unfortunately did not just create this program for fun ...