Thu, 21 Aug 2008
dd, dd_rescue, and ddrescue
The short answer: "Use GNU ddrescue. GNU stands for Quality."
dd is a classic UNIX utility to read from and write to files (often devices). Typically, one uses it to copy a hard disk to a file, or to image a hard drive by copying a backup onto it.
One hits a problem when the hard disk has errors. In this case, dd abruptly stops working in the middle, reporting an "Input/output error." But when the hard disk has errors, usually what you want is to get an image of all the blocks on the hard disk that are readable - not just the first few before the first error!
(Note for the pedantic: Yes, I know about dd conv=notrunc,noerror. They're so easy to misuse (mostly by forgetting one of those two options) that they're worth avoiding.)
Two tools are available for this particular purpose. Confusingly, one is called ddrescue, and the other is called dd_rescue.
Around 2001, Kurt Garloff wrote dd_rescue. It does what dd does if you pass it some options, but it comes with instructions on how to use it to recover data from drivers, like by running it multiple times or bakcwards. A wrapper script called dd_rhelp automates that process.
When you're running dd_rescue on an obscure OS like Mac OS X 10.3 because you dropped your laptop in Uganda and the Linux partition grew bad blocks and you still want your data, you will find that dd_rhelp is written as a complicated shell script that relies on GNU versions of core system utilities. OS X provides non-GNU versions, and you will waste hours fiddling with compiling those utilities just so you can run some dumb shell script.
In the summer of 2004, the same summer as I dropped my laptop, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote "ddrescue," a stand-alone C++ tool that does the same things as dd_rhelp, but more sanely and therefore more efficiently. It became an official GNU project. GNU ddrescue, like dd_rhelp, can keep a log file to let itself gracefully pick up after interrputions.
When your hard disk fails, you should turn to your backups. But if you need a tool like these, just remember: "GNU ddrescue."
$ sudo apt-get install gddrescue
