Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1vazbo4/i_imaged_an_old_ssd_with_ddrescue_and_rescued/

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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/A_Time_Space_Person on 2026-07-30 16:57:10+00:00.

I imaged an old ~512GB SSD that had been sitting unpowered for 2-3 years. It was the drive of an old laptop running Debian. I imaged it from a live Ubuntu USB onto an external drive.

My sequence was roughly:

# First pass, skip scraping to grab everything readable fast

sudo ddrescue -n /dev/sdb image.img image.mapfile

# Second pass, let it scrape the bad areas

sudo ddrescue /dev/sdb image.img image.mapfile

Final result: 99.99% rescued, about 30 MB of unreadable sectors out of 512 GB. ddrescue reported "Finished." I then computed a SHA-256 of the image.

Since then I mounted the image read-only in WSL2, browsed the ext4 root partition, and it seems OK - I haven't hit any missing or corrupt files.

My question: some people have suggested I should have run the second pass with a retry count, e.g. -r3. Should I do that?

I do plan to wipe the original drive eventually (only after I have multiple verified copies), so if there's a real argument for squeezing out those last sectors while the drive still exists, now's the window.