Why should I use DDRescue-GUI?

If the features above didn't convince you, then this might :) If you're a normal user and wondering why you should use this program with ddrescue instead of one of the other popular tools, you should know that ddrescue is smarter than quite a lot of the other tools:

Let's imagine that you have an old hard drive with precious data on it, say, family photos. GNU ddrescue will try to read the easily-readable parts of the disk first, which might grab, say, 70% of your photos quickly. This is important because drives often fail quite soon after showing warning signs, and it might let you get a fair amount of data before your drive completely gives up. After this, ddrescue will make several more passes to try and get the rest of the data.

Some other tools, such as SpinRite, tend to read the drive in sequence, and refuse to give up when they find an unreadable part of the drive. Combined with other techniques, this can theoretically get the data off your drive and even fix your drive. However, it could also break your drive before you get much data, especially if there are a load of bad areas at the start of the drive, but most of the rest of it is readable. Note that SpinRite is a well-respected tool, and has helped a lot of people, so I mean no disrespect to its users or authors. I would worry about using a disk again after it failed though, even if it had been fixed.

That aside, if you're an administrator, you might enjoy looking at ddrescue's output so you can see exactly what going on, rather than use a styled GUI. I certainly do. In this case, you're in luck: DDRescue-GUI makes it easy for you to see the output as well, if you want to:

Figure 1.3. Terminal output in DDRescue-GUI

Terminal output in DDRescue-GUI