[Bug-ddrescue] interpreting ddrescue 1.21 terminal output

[David Kamaunu]

Hello,

  I am currently undertaking a recovery of a 200GB Maxtor IDE HDD that has
serious I/O Comm issues and large amount of bad blocks in the forward third
and middle of drivespace.    The first and second runs I made with ddrescue
were with a much older version (1.10?) and then with ddrescueGUI .  I don't
like the GUI version as it has few options and lots of hang time or lag.
I ran those two-three in reverse with no retries, scraping or trim with a
hich (128) cluster/read.   Now I am using ddrescue 1.21 on Parted Magic
2016 and allowing retries (2), no scrape, smaller sector read and fixed
length of run.
Now I have a question about the terminal output of concurrent project.  It
seems that the program did two very large jumps.  The first from ipos 1147M
to 1777M (630MB) and then again from 1777 to 2723 (946M).   Could you
explain to me what the program is doing?  I'm still a green horn and unsure
whether I should stay the course or bail and try something different in the
invocation.
In addition I would like to ask if it is better to run a number of short
runs or do relatively large chunks and let the application sip the drive
for several days?

Thank you ,

David Kamaunu