> What does Spinrite actually do that is materially different than ddrescue?
Pretty sure Spinrite repairs/recovers, as you imply in your very next sentence (which I agree with, it's not a good idea to play with the filesystem of a failing disk.) I've never used it, though, so I may be wrong.
The real question for me is why would somebody pay for it over using ddrescue to get an image, and TestDisk/PhotoRec to do the filesystem recovery (on the image)? They're free and very good.
Pretty sure Spinrite repairs/recovers, as you imply in your very next sentence (which I agree with, it's not a good idea to play with the filesystem of a failing disk.) I've never used it, though, so I may be wrong.
The real question for me is why would somebody pay for it over using ddrescue to get an image, and TestDisk/PhotoRec to do the filesystem recovery (on the image)? They're free and very good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk