Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install gddrescue on Ubuntu 20.04.
What is gddrescue
gddrescue is:
The gddrescue tool copies data from one file or block device
(hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data
in case of read errors.
gddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to.
So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to
fill in the gaps.
The basic operation of gddrescue is fully automatic. That is,
you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the
log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile
feature of gddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only
the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue
at any time and resume it later at the same point.
Automatic merging of backups: If you have two or more damaged
copies of a file, cdrom, etc, and run gddrescue on all of them,
one at a time, with the same output file, you will probably
obtain a complete and error-free file. This is so because the
probability of having damaged areas at the same places on
different input files is very low. Using the logfile, only the
needed blocks are read from the second and successive copies.
The logfile is periodically saved to disc. So in case of a crash
you can resume the rescue with little recopying. Also, the same
logfile can be used for multiple commands that copy different
areas of the file, and for multiple recovery attempts over
different subsets.
gddrescue aligns its I/O buffer to the sector size so that it
can be used to read from raw devices. For efficiency reasons,
also aligns it to the memory page size if page size is a
multiple of sector size.
Please note that this is the GNU ddrescue version providing the
ddrescue executable. The package is named gddrescue because the
ddrescue version of Kurt Garloff used to have the ddrescue
package name already.
There are three methods to install gddrescue on Ubuntu 20.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install gddrescue Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install gddrescue
Install gddrescue Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install gddrescue
Install gddrescue Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install gddrescue
How To Uninstall gddrescue on Ubuntu 20.04
To uninstall only the gddrescue package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove gddrescue
Uninstall gddrescue And Its Dependencies
To uninstall gddrescue and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 20.04, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove gddrescue
Remove gddrescue Configurations and Data
To remove gddrescue configuration and data from Ubuntu 20.04 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge gddrescue
Remove gddrescue configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove gddrescue configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge gddrescue
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install gddrescue package on Ubuntu 20.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.
