[Bug-ddrescue] Feature request (if it's allowed here :) )

[Oleg Krutov]

Hello,

I use ddrescue fairly often and have found it a very useful tool, and I'd like to request a couple of features:

1) I noticed that when copying clusters that are non-4KB-aligned (eg, because of bad blocks), copying speed considerably slows down and manually aligning copying area one can achieve a full speed

(for example: 0x00008600 0x4A85D55A00 ? - copying speed is ~40MB/s; with modified logfile like 0x00008000 0x4A85D56000 ?  speed is ~120MB/s)

It would be very useful IMHO to add new parameter, say, "--cluster-align=<sectors>" and, when set, copy by full cluster size only aligned - reaching aligning margin by single-sector or multi-sector reading. That could, I think, seriously speed up copying process.

2) Although I don't think that feature will be in great demand, maybe there are folks like me :) that use ddrescue for different tricky things (eg, external generation of log files for copying by one physical head at a time etc.) Making these things, there is a need to introduce one more state for disk area, say, "ignored" - it means, that no actions need to be performed with this area at all, just skip it during copying and leave intact this record in logfile.

That's all so far :)

Thanks again for a nice tool, it helps many people to save much data :) 

Sincerely,

 Oleg