CAUTION: I would like to point that relates to an unfinished image. In any event, anything less than a 100% recovery will leave portions on the target image/drive that have not been written to by ddrescue. If copying to a brand new hard drive, those areas are (hopefully) likely to be zeros. But in any other case, those areas will contain whatever data was there previously. For someone that uses their system for data recovery on a regular basis, and is using image files or reusing hard drives, those areas could contain data from a previous recovery! This could be a privacy issue in some cases, but also could cause an issue with running any other sort of repair/file recovery tools on the recovered image/drive. The unrecovered parts could contain "garbage" data that could affect accurate recovery. In these cases I would recommend using the fill mode of ddrescue to fill any unfinished/untried areas with zeros. Example command: ddrescue --fill-mode=?/*- /dev/zero recovered_image logfile This would write zeros to any portion of the recovery that was not successfully read from the source. Reference: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ddrescue/2013-11/msg00011.html