Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
genecent
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Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by genecent » Mon Jan 09, 2012 1:08 pm

Hello,

I purchased RStudio and created disk images of all drives in my RAID. This took a week. I then built the virtual raid and volume group and ran a scan. This took almost 2 days. Then I waiting another day for the "Analyzing recognized partitions layout" operation to run. I finally got a browsable list of partitions that were discovered. However while browing my data R-Studio crashed (I was just over halfway through the thousands of partitions).

I reopened all my images, re-created my virtual RAIDs and volume group (2.71TB), and then re-opened the scan file (>500MB). The system has been chunking away on it for almost 16 hours now and still hasn't opened it yet.

So my question is HOW CAN THIS BE SPED UP? I am afraid to press STOP and find out that it doesn't load everything. If it crashes again (which I suspect it will), then I will have to do this again and waste another day waiting to see what I can recover. This has been an excruciatingly slow process...What exactly is it analyzing? I thought the whole purpose of saving a scan file was to allow rapid re-opening of the discovered data?

William

Alt
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by Alt » Tue Jan 10, 2012 3:48 am

Well, working with large RAIDs with a lot of files takes a lot of time. None can be done about that.
Generally, disk scan is a very thorough and therefore very slow process of analysing every piece of data to reconstruct very seriously damaged disks. Moreover, if there are a lot of files in a lot of folders on a partition, and that file/folder structure is severely damaged, R-Studio may even open that partition quite slowly.
What is your system: 32-bit or 64-bit and how much RAM is in it?

shipleyc
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by shipleyc » Sun Aug 05, 2012 2:23 am

I have a similar issue - it's going to take 15hours to run the initial scan on my rebuilt raid 0. I am running 64-bit windows 7 with 24GB RAM, but when I check the system performance monitor, RStudio64 is only using 45,328K of RAM. Total physical memory being used is 7GB. I don't use a pagefile (seriously, who needs one with 24GB of RAM). So where is all the extra RAM RStudio is supposed to use to make this go faster? 45MB doesn't seem like a lot of RAM to me. Firefox is using more RAM to display this forum to me. Same thing in Ubuntu 64-bit - doesn't use much RAM there either.

What's the deal? How can I make it better?

Alt
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by Alt » Sun Aug 05, 2012 4:47 am

shipleyc wrote:I have a similar issue - it's going to take 15hours to run the initial scan on my rebuilt raid 0. I am running 64-bit windows 7 with 24GB RAM, but when I check the system performance monitor, RStudio64 is only using 45,328K of RAM. Total physical memory being used is 7GB. I don't use a pagefile (seriously, who needs one with 24GB of RAM). So where is all the extra RAM RStudio is supposed to use to make this go faster? 45MB doesn't seem like a lot of RAM to me. Firefox is using more RAM to display this forum to me. Same thing in Ubuntu 64-bit - doesn't use much RAM there either.

What's the deal? How can I make it better?
1. Do you use the last version of R-Studio?
2. What is the size of the RAID 0?

I recon you confuse two different things - disk scan in which the main bottleneck is disk access speed and file enumeration on an already scanned partition where indeed the RAM size and CPU power matter.

shipleyc
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by shipleyc » Sun Aug 05, 2012 8:25 am

Thank you for the quick reply. I am running version 6.1.152029

I am confused because the website says:
Support for 64- and 32-bit Windows versions. Under a 64-bit Windows, R-Studio overcomes the 3GB RAM limit for a 32-bit application and utilizes all physical RAM installed in the 64-bit Windows machine. This greatly enhances performance of the software, especially when scanning high-capacity disks.

That should be a little clearer. I am "scanning high-capacity disks" at the moment, am I not?

I do understand that disk speed can be but one issue here on an initial scan for a non-existent or damaged filesystem, but the statement above does not clearly indicate where the >3GB RAM becomes useful and the documentation doesn't do that, either (or if it does, I haven't found it).

shipleyc
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by shipleyc » Sun Aug 05, 2012 8:33 am

It also won't search for the user-based file types I've entered. Is that because I have the trial edition? I'm trying to see if it will recover the files I need and those are not typical Word documents. I've created the definitions as file extensions and a description, no other information (because the documentation says it's all optional). But when I load the definitions and select them, every time I go back to click the "Known File Types" button to see if they are selected ,they are not. But the other custom selections I've made for the built in file types are there (like I've disabled development documents and 'other files).

Alt
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by Alt » Mon Aug 06, 2012 11:07 am

OK, I'll change the phrase scanning high-capacity disks to processing high-capacity disks. for clarification purposes.
I need to look at the file type description file and a couple of such files to understand what's wrong. The demo mode doesn't have anything to do with that.

shipleyc
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Re: Analyzing recognized partitions takes over a day

Post by shipleyc » Tue Aug 07, 2012 12:01 pm

I'm not sure that's enough of a description change. You may want to specify that when the system recognizes a file structure and rebuilds it, it will process faster with 64-bit Windows. But indicate somewhere else that if the file system is not recognized and it has to scan the disks, the bottleneck here is not RAM but disk speed, disk controller, and other hardware limitations. I believe that with an unrecognized file structure, this is where the system gets intensive at scanning, so you may want to make that explicitly clear. You also might want to make clear that when scanning an unrecognized file system, you do not retain any folder structure (that is just the case with data recovery, not necessarily a limitation of your software in particular) and you have to specify the files the system will be checking for.

I will definitely attempt to use your product in the future, it just didn't work swiftly enough for me this time and I ended up sending it to a data recovery facility. If I had more time, I would have put in more effort, but it was simply a matter of time vs cost and time won. Thanks for the product and if I run into another situation, I'll take a look at you again.

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