It would be extremely useful if a scan session could be paused, saved, and resumed, so that if a scan needs to be interrupted for whatever reason a user doesn't have to start the process completely over.
I was scanning my 4TB harddrive, but after it sat at 31% without any progress for nearly 4 whole days, I decided to check the drive temperature and found that it was 118℉. I decided that the drive must be overheating, so I cancelled the scan and am letting the drive cool. (It might also be getting hung up on bad sectors, so I’m going to try cloning the drive and seeing if recovery software has an easier time skipping over “bad sectors” on the copy.)
If I didn't have to restart the scan from the beginning, not only would it save me time, but probably also save wear on my harddrive.
Another use case is in the event of a power outage. I live in area that typically has brown-outs about once a month, and less frequently the power can be expected to go out for at least a few minutes if not half a day a couple times in the year. I do have a UPS, but it doesn't have enough power to run all day long; it just gives me enough time to save my work and shut everything down.
Sadly, this feature,while often asked for, would be impractical. The state of deleted files changes between scan A and Scan B on every drive; just the act of turning off a drive touches file-table and windows itself may create/write files (system information data).
That said your cloning idea might work - though I say this only because the pro version of Recuva has the feature of optionally making a disc img before recovery
The state of deleted files changes between scan A and Scan B on every drive; just the act of turning off a drive touches file-table and windows itself may create/write files (system information data).
Even if it's a "lost" partition that Windows sees as only raw data? That shouldn't be happening.
At the very least, being able to pause a scan for cooling might be helpful. An option to automatically pause after X minutes of scanning then resume after Y minutes of cooling might mitigate overheating issues. Or if adding the ability to monitor the drive temperature isn't too far beyond the scope of Recuva, an option to pause scanning when temperature rises above X and resume once it's dropped down to Y would be even better.
In any case I'm setting up a fan to blow across my drive dock to hopefully keep it cool.