Feature Request

[RForce]

I can appreciate that R-Studio is designed with the assumption that the end user is working with failing drives and wants to load the entire file structure into RAM right away. But, as a data recovery professional who only ever uses R-Studio against a clone or image file, it would be nice to have an option in the settings to change how R-Studio access the file structure. So, rather than read the entire file structure right away, have it read the file system as needed to speed up the access to the file tree...especially with EXT formatted drives.

[Data-Medics]

+1 to that. Perhaps this could be a feature just added to the Technician version. Especially for remote recoveries. This week I've been doing a remote RAID recovery using the remote agent in the island of Barbados. It's taken over 45min each time to just open the file system because it has to move the entire MFT over a terribly slow internet connection (on an island) to my station.

Fortunately I figured out the RAID almost immediately just from looking at the drives in hex. But if I'd had to brute force figure out the RAID it would have taken a lifetime.

[Alt]

The reason for which R-Studio keeps the entire file structure in the system 's RAM is far from the idea that the end user might work with a failing drive. We have quite a strict advice for working with a failing HDD: either go to a reputable pro, or, at least, image the drive. R-Studio keeps all the data in RAM because R-Studio not just opens a file system, it deeply analyses it, and all the data needs to be quickly available. Sometimes, that analysis may take a lot of time, and even require more RAM than the system has.
In the future (no data promised!), we plan to implement a kind of such a feature. It will open the folder structure as it's browsed through. Under such file system opening, it will be possible to recover files from FAT/Ext2-4/UFS partitions, and copy only existing (not deleted!) files from NTFS/HFS/ReFS partitions.