Successful data recovery (was Re: File signatures??)

[AC]

On 2017-06-30 14:01, matt at considine.net wrote:
[recovery snipped]

In an emergency, since you're on a linux box, you should consider
ddrescue as an option to recover data from the disk.  I have
successfully used it to recover entire hard drives that were having
mechanical failures.  You can recover to an image file (which you can
later mount) or to another physical drive which will completely clone
the disk.

Recovery with ddrescue will attempt to maintain all structures on disk
and only pad out anything that it can't recover at all after several
attempts.  It can be quite slow depending on the state of the disk.  My
last recovery took two weeks of continuous operation due to spindle and
head bearing failures but I had a 100% recovery from that disk.