R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
Data-Medics
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R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Mon Sep 05, 2016 4:09 pm

First off, I'm a big fan of R-Studio and appreciate all the work you've put into making a great product. Just a couple feature requests I'd love to see implemented, at least for those of us with a Technician license, if not for everyone.

1. When using the remote agent to copy a disk to an image or to another disk on the remote machine the copy speed is extremely slow. Seems like the data is having to travel across the internet/network and back even though both drives are in the same remote system. Is there a way the software could offload this to be handled entirely on the remote machine so the internet/network connection isn't a bottleneck? I realize that you might not be able to be scanning the data for lost files at the same time.
At times I'd like to be able to use the software to just help a client make a clone remotely which they can then physically mail in for recovery.

2. Support for XFS file system. (I know this will take some time)

3. Ability to open a terminal or cmd prompt ported to the remote machine. This would be useful if I need to reformat a drive on the remote before copying data to it or if I need to unmount a drive (in Mac OS) to be able to direct write to it. Or to use dd or ddrescue on the remote machine in case of issues getting a good image.

4. Ability to generate MD5 and SHA1 checksum and forensic log on an image file created of a drive/partition/region/etc. I know it can already do this for individual files, but it doesn't seem to have the ability to generate this for a whole image file, which is required as a part of proper data acquisition.

5. Ability to simultaneously copy an object to two destinations rather than just one. Combined with #4 above this would allow for proper data acquisition.

6. Ability to work with Encase image files with extension .E01

7. Ability to list files sequentially by their sector location on the disk. This would be helpful in cases where you're trying to piece together a fragmented file such as a VMDK image split into a few pieces.

8. Ability to adjust manually the offset from a file or group of files referenced location and it's actual location which happens to be at a different offset. I've had cases where a drive was re-partitioned / re-formatted and the partition layout was different from the original. R-Studio was able to find the files in RAW and able to find most of the references to the files, but couldn't seem to ever match the two because the offset was off (likely due to the new partition start throwing it off) and none of the found filesystem offsets seemed to match it.

9. Ability to work with PC-3000 split images

10. Faster speed working with RAID of very small block size (e.g. 1 sector stripe size)

11. Rename files in extra found files with common extensions.

12. Support for VMFS file system.
Last edited by Data-Medics on Wed Nov 02, 2016 9:49 am, edited 3 times in total.

Corsari
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Corsari » Tue Sep 06, 2016 1:21 am

I'd add this

- in the copy wizard (when saving marked items) add a tab for files matching properties with option like copy only matching AND OR SKIP copying only matching,
It would be matter of re use the options available in the file search function

In particular is missing the BASIC function to automatically skipping copying files with size more than/bigger than.


Regards
Robert
Technical Manager @ Recupero Dati RAID FAsTec (Italy)

USEFUL RULES and GUIDELINES
1) What to check BEFORE begin a disk image/clone process [link]
2) Disks that are too slow while imaging/cloning them [link]
3) All my posts on this forum [link]

Data-Medics
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Tue Sep 06, 2016 1:01 pm

Actually, I'll add a few more to my list of requests above:

7. Ability to list files sequentially by their sector location on the disk. This would be helpful in cases where you're trying to piece together a fragmented file such as a VMDK image split into a few pieces.

8. Ability to adjust manually the offset from a file or group of files referenced location and it's actual location which happens to be at a different offset. I've had cases where a drive was re-partitioned / re-formatted and the partition layout was different from the original. R-Studio was able to find the files in RAW and able to find most of the references to the files, but couldn't seem to ever match the two because the offset was off (likely due to the new partition start throwing it off) and none of the found filesystem offsets seemed to match it.

Alt
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Alt » Thu Sep 08, 2016 12:48 pm

I've passed your requests to our developers. Thank you!

Data-Medics
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:56 pm

Oh, and one more which should be a really easy one. The ability to work with split image files, such as those created by PC-3000 when imaging a drive to files. They are just straight binary, but split into chunks with designations like:

img000000000.bin
img000500000.bin
img001000000.bin
img001500000.bin
img002000000.bin
etc.

The chunk names will vary based on the size of the chunks selected, but they will always be sequential. Plus there is a map file which keeps track of which sectors were and weren't read from the original drive. Even if it can't work with the map file, would still be good if it could open a split image file. Even if just by manually selecting all the necessary files and sorting by name.

Alt
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Alt » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:55 am

Data-Medics wrote:Oh, and one more which should be a really easy one. The ability to work with split image files, such as those created by PC-3000 when imaging a drive to files.
To my understanding, you can do that right now. Open the image files and create a compound volume out of them: Volume Sets, Stripe Sets, and Mirrors. Moreover, you may add empty space between the images, if necessary, create regions, exclusive regions, and even include such objects into an another RAID object.

Data-Medics
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Mon Sep 26, 2016 1:35 pm

Alt wrote:
Data-Medics wrote:Oh, and one more which should be a really easy one. The ability to work with split image files, such as those created by PC-3000 when imaging a drive to files.
To my understanding, you can do that right now. Open the image files and create a compound volume out of them: Volume Sets, Stripe Sets, and Mirrors. Moreover, you may add empty space between the images, if necessary, create regions, exclusive regions, and even include such objects into an another RAID object.
Yeah but on a large HDD image file there will be hundreds of these, sometimes thousands. To sit and manually open each one and add them to a JBOD would take a lifetime (and I'd bet crash the program before you finish).

Data-Medics
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Fri Oct 14, 2016 9:24 pm

I'd like to add another feature request to my list. The ability to de-stripe RAID data at higher speed from RAID arrays which employ a very small block size. It seems recently there are more and more devices using a 512byte single sector stripe size. Extracting files when the size is this small can take a very long time, sometimes into a week or more. I assume this delay is created because the software needs to create a separate ATA request for each sector of data from each drive in the array.

What I would purpose to address this issue would be some sort of a RAM drive type of buffer which could read ahead from each drive using a larger block read size, then the data could be de-striped from entirely from the RAM copy. I'd bet this would seriously speed up the process.

Data-Medics
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by Data-Medics » Mon Oct 24, 2016 9:17 am

OK, I've got another one to add to this list.

In the extra found files, it often now seems to be detecting files by type, but then naming them based on obsolete file references. For example, I'm getting jpg files that are named as .dll, .dat, .tmp, etc. It'd be nice if in the extra found files by type folders it'd rename the extensions to the standard one at least. Recovering a misplaced jpg with a .tmp extension doesn't do any good, and I'm wasting a lot of time renaming these. Even if it's an option in settings to enable/disable renaming the extra found files would be nice.

I've updated my list at the top to reflect all the other features I've added to my request.

shinobiyan
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Re: R-Studio Technician Feature Requests

Post by shinobiyan » Wed Nov 02, 2016 2:42 am

Agree for Data-Medics ,to be continue feature requests in Technician version

1.New version FS:BtrFS, XFS, Oracle/SUN/NAS:ZFS,Android NandFlash FS:YAFFS,F2FS, IBM (Power) HP(Itanium) Small Computer System FS:JFS2,VxFS(Veritas), EMC Isilon NAS:OneFS,Apple XSAN:StornextFS
2.Research support virtual Storage,block storage(aka:Dell EqualLogic PS series,HP EVA and 3PAR series ,IBM Storwize family)
3.The driver layer Image mount (dd/dsk/img,rdr,VHDX,vmdk,vdi,e01),and iscsi LAN share mapping.
4.Qemu,Hyper-V,Vmware Virtual Machine Base system with Snapshot merge recovery feature.
5.key File Carver Plug-in unit feature(aka Database,Video files:DBF,MDF,AVI,MP4),can be in Oracle ASM, raw device.

R-Drive Image feature requests

1.Startup version fast support new Macbook MacbookPro & new MS Surface Can be Boot Acquisition disk image.
2.support thunderbolt3.
3.support More than 2TB of the Storage or HDD generate more than of the 2TB E01 image file,and HASH verify.
4.The driver layer Image mount (dd/dsk/img,rdr,VHDX,vmdk,vdi,e01),and iscsi LAN share mapping.
5.support generate and convert non standard sector disk image or virtual mapping to a standard 512 sector disk (aka 520 522 528 byte per sector FC,SAS Disk).

@ALT for developers
Last edited by shinobiyan on Wed Nov 30, 2016 11:33 pm, edited 9 times in total.

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