[Bug-ddrescue] recovering specific files from ntfs with ddrescue and ntfstools

[Piotr Pawłow]

Hello,

I wrote a simple perl script to recover single files using ddrescue. It may 
seem crazy, but focusing on required blocks only, with help of ddrescue's 
retry and reverse options, can sometimes do miracles and recover files which 
are very difficult to recover using other methods.

More information here: http://pp.siedziba.pl/tmp/ddr/ddrstrace-readme.html

I've also been toying with another idea - an NBD server which copies missing 
sectors with ddrescue. It has its advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
- should work with kernel-based file systems and all tools
- write protection (just don't implement writing :)
- partitions support
- easy to use, just mount the device or use some tools on it
- faster (if integrated into ddrescue)

Disadvantages:
- would have to be integrated into ddrescue ; calling ddrescue for each 
request and parsing its log file is not practical when requests are limited 
to 128KB of data, unless a large read-ahead is used
- would have to process read requests as they arrive ; batching as with 
strace based solution not possible

Thoughts?

Cheers