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  • Runtime Imaging in R-Studio

R-Studio Technician versions can perform three types of object imaging:

  • Linear imaging (from the drive beginning to its end)
  • Runtime imaging (drive imaging in parallel with other drive operations)
  • Multi-pass imaging (performing drive imaging through several passes)

Their comparison chart can be reviewed in our article, Linear Imaging vs Runtime Imaging vs Multi-pass imaging.

The best practice for working with a problematic hard drive is to create its image first and then perform all necessary disk operations with that image while the drive remains elsewhere. Such practice minimizes disk wear, which is especially important for drives that may fail at any moment.

Virtually all data recovery programs have built-in imaging capabilities. However, most of them use linear disk reading to read a drive from beginning to end. This approach provides faster read speed, but it has very serious drawbacks.

For example, if the program hits an area with many bad sectors, it may get stuck. This wastes a lot of time without producing any meaningful results. Moreover, the struggling drive might fail completely during such imaging, thus making data recovery nearly impossible. However, there are many cases in which it's not necessary to have all data from the entire disk. For example, if only few files are to be recovered and only the image of the drive areas with those files are needed. Runtime imaging can also be used for this purpose.

With runtime imaging, all data from the source (faulty drive) being read for any purpose is simultaneously being written to another storage device (target). Any further operations with that data will be made on that target. This approach combines fast reading speeds by only reading from the necessary disk areas with the added reliability of disk imaging.
Runtime imaging in R-Studio
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Performing runtime imaging with R-Studio Technician allows you to save data from the source (faulty) drive, where it can then be transferred either to another physical drive or to an image file. Moreover, it can be combined with specialized data recovery hardware to extract data from very weak or malfunctioning hard drives.

As an example, we'll show the runtime imaging of a faulty drive that is connected through DeepSpar USB stabilizer to a Windows 10 machine running R-Studio T80+. We'll use another hard drive as the target.

1. Select the DEEPSPAR:WDC… hard drive and click the “Start runtime imaging” button.
Source and target for runtime imaging
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Select Sector by sector clone in the Destination type and the WDC WD 1600BEVT… drive as the target. You need also to specify the location and name for the sector map file. Note that it cannot be placed either on the source or destination drives.

R-Studio will warn you that the data on the target will be completely lost. It remains inaccessible for the system and other programs, too.
Warning that all data on the target will be lost
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Click the Yes button and R-Studio will start runtime imaging.
Runtime imaging
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If all data from the source has been read and copied to the target, the target then becomes the exact copy of the source and all further operations can be done from the target drive. Consequently, the source can then be removed from the system.
The target used as the source in R-Studio
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All information obtained from the source, including scan info and sector mapping, can be loaded and used for data recovery from the target.

Conclusions:
Runtime imaging supported by R-Studio Technician is a useful feature that creates an object image in parallel with other drive operations. This approach facilitates faster read speeds and greater reliability of object imaging.

Data Recovery Feedback
372 feedbacks
Rating: 4.8 / 5
I have used R-studio with USB Stabilizer,Rapid-spar,Deep spar, Pc3000, MRT.I am thoroughly satisfied.Now i have made head maps to isolate bad heads of hard disk when used with mounted disks.
I was completely lost. My Mac seemed to have eaten my 4TB external USB drive - was formatted APFS encrypted. The volume just disappeared while running and I had to reboot and when it came back the volume could not be unlocked / mounted natively. I tried a whole heap of methods (https://github.com/libyal/libfsapfs/, drat and many others) to no avail. R-Studio data recovery was able to recover the entire volume - a complete life saver, worth every cent!
I really love your R-Studio product, I am doing Data Recovery as a professional, I used RS since the early versions and I loved the product, as far as I can tell, R-Studio, especially the Tech Version (but including the standard) is one of the best and excellent tools for a pro to have in the arsenal of tools in a pro DR lab, especially combining with the specialized Data Recovery hardware providers like DeepSpar, and PC3000, the rest of `wannabees` out there are waste of time, strongly recommend
I lost more than 200K files from my NAS due to a mistake. I tried 3 different recovery solutions over the 4 TB raid disks, and all of them performed ok but to be honest none of them were able to Raw recover the files and rename them with meaningful names out of the Metadata like R-TT did, then I was able to sort again my files and pictures and kind of restore all of them.

R-TT may not be the easiest or most user-friendly solution, but the algorithm used for the renaming saved me THOUSAND of hours of opening ...
Just recovered my old ext4 partition with R-Studio after trying testdisk and R-Linux without success. That partition was overwritten by another ext4 partition and I was losing my hope until I tried R-Studio demo. It detected all my files and directories again!

Bought it and 100% recommend it for anyone with a similar issue.