Idea - Incorporate DFSee for partition, file system and file recovery in SR 7

[Scott]

DFSee is free (formerly paid) software which has functionality to examine and fix partitions and file systems, with file and partition recovery and cloning facilities. The author has sold this commercially for about 20 years, but he's announced that he's retiring and has made the binary free. He has stated that he plans to open source the program in the near future. Steve, this seems like a similar situation to RTOS, with an author who has done all he can with the code.

Website here:
DFSee Homepage

The program is written in C, and started out on OS/2 but is now a cross-platform text mode UI program with the same capabilities on DOS, Windows, OS/2, Mac, and Linux. The author also has already open-sourced the cross-platform text menuing system he wrote for DFSee.

It understands both MBR and GPT partitioned disks, and understands the following filesystems:
MS and Windows: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, ExFAT, NTFS
OS/2: HPFS, JFS
Mac: HFS+, APFS
Linux: Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, Reiser

@Steve, you'd obviously have to see what sort of terms this author would want, but I think you'd be shaving 6 to 12 months of development time off of SR 7, assuming you want to incorporate this type of functionality as you've stated. Maybe take a look once you start thinking about the SR 7 feature set.

 

[Steve]

A future SpinRite will definitely add cloning, file level and filesystem recovery. If he were to open source his code I would be stupid not to take advantage of it as a reference point. Not knowing anything about what he's done, I have no idea how much of it might be useful. The good news is that there are now a great many existing open source projects which support those file systems and documentation is far more available that it once was. So I'll definitely be open to anything that might help to reduce development time. Thanks for the pointer. If you happen to become aware of his source being posted, I'd be happy to have you bring that to my attention!

 

[Simon Zerafa]

Hi Steve,

Clearly if SR 7.0 is filing system aware then it can concentrate DynaStat on the areas that actually contain data rather than blank or empty storage.

For many if not most users this would result in a radial improvement in performance if data recovery is the desired goal.

For actual data recovery I still use R-Tools R-Studio, which I believe you are familiar with.

Are you likely to produce something with similar capabilities within SR 7.0?

Kind Regards

Simon Zerafa

 

[Steve]

Simon (@Simon Zerafa):

In a word: Yes. We'll be getting there incrementally, first duplicating what we have today. But that will be just the start. My absolute plan is for SpinRite to evolve past where it's always been, which has been an "in place" drive maintenance and data recovery tool (which has helped and recovered the data for so many hundreds of thousands of people through the years), into a tool that will be able to remove recovered data from troubled drives to another media.

Back when SpinRite was created, 10 megabytes of storage cost around $5,000 USD and few people had more than a single mass storage device. Those times have obviously changed. My point is that originally, there was no where else to place recovered data. Today that's not a problem. So I'm extremely excited about where we're going to take SpinRite in the future... and it will definitely be into file system aware recovery, image cloning, and so forth.