GNU ddrescue 1.30 "Orders of Magnitude" Better In Recovery From Drives With A Dead Head

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 4 January 2026 at 11:42 AM EST. 23 Comments

GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by "orders of magnitude" for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head.

The headline change with ddrescue 1.30 comes down to:

"The changes in this version improve by orders of magnitude the automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head. For example, all the recoverable data in a 1 TB drive with one [of] its 4 heads dead can now be recovered after just 283 read errors instead of the 3_782_794 read errors needed by ddrescue 1.29. (ddrescue 1.29 with the options '--cpass=1,2 --skip-size=32MiB' can recover the data after 880 read errors, but the point is that an unexperienced user can now achieve results that only an expert could achieve with the previous version of ddrescue)."

The GNU ddrescue 1.30 release also comes with other improvements, a new "--no-sweep" option to disable the reading of skipped areas, and a variety of other enhancements to this useful free software data recovery tool.

👁 Inside hard drive

Downloads and more information on today's ddrescue 1.30 release via the mailing list announcement.