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.

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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.

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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.

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Click the Yes button and R-Studio will start 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.

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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.