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



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