[Bug-ddrescue] Warning idea.

[andrew zajac]

Hello Antonio.

I think a lot of people who are new to Gnu/Linux run it to use Gnu ddrescue.  It seems to me that they often make a particular mistake. 

That is to confuse a destination partition with the filesystem on that partition.  An example would be the following:

The user plugs in an external drive with enough free space to image their 160 gig partition (a 500 gig drive with 300 gigs free).  They figure out that the external drive is mounted at, say, /dev/sdc1 so instead of running

sudo ddrescue /dev/sda1 /media/External/image /media/External/log

They run

sudo ddrescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sdc1 log

The latter just blows away the 200 gigs of data they already had on the drive without warning.

I suggest that when Gnu ddrescue is asked to write directly to a device such as a partition, it prompt the user with a warning that all existing data on the destination drive will be lost.  If the destination is a file, no such warning is given. 

Perhaps, too, sizes can be checked to see if sufficient space is available on either the filesystem in the case of an image file, or the destination partition/device is big enough to fit the source device?

Best regards from a huge Gnu ddrescue fan,

Andrew Zajac