ddrescue

Rescue data from failing disks

medium risk

interactive breakdown — edit the command and press Explain
$ 
⚠ Risks & cautions
What it does

GNU ddrescue copies data from failing drives while keeping a map of bad areas.

Common flags
FlagMeaning
-nSkip the scraping phase
-rRetry count
-dDirect disc access
Examples
ddrescue -n /dev/sda disk.img disk.mapFirst pass · explain & risk-check →
ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sda disk.img disk.mapRetry bad sectors · explain & risk-check →
Related
dd smartctl fsck
Open the full explainer →More in Disks & Filesystems

Reference text is hand-written and may be incomplete — check man ddrescue for your version. Test destructive commands on a non-production system first.