[Bug-ddrescue] Suggestion: Split down to specified min size

[David Austin]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for another great open-source program!

I've used ddrescue in the past and am currently using it again
with considerable success.


I have a suggestion for speeding up my use case.  I'm trying to
recover a friend's photo collection.  As such, I'm not interested
in a faithful block-by-block recovery - what I'm really after is 
recovery of all good parts of at least a certain size.

So the initial pass has proceeded (rapidly) to discover most of
the good parts of the disk.  But the "splitting" pass is going really
slowly.  I still have a few parts of > 20MB, so I'm going to wait,
but it seems to me that the splitting phase could be better if there
was a parameterisable target to split down to.  Then, instead of
blocking trying to read a sequence of bad blocks from the "non-split"
block, the split phase could apply a simple division strategy.

(In general, it seems like it might be desirable for ddrescue to
try to sub-divide larger non-split blocks, rather than attempting
to read ~256 blocks from the start (as it appears to be doing)).

Thanks,
David