hello and thank you for the time you have invested!
i have noticed your program would be very useful for file recovery.
We can begin by searching for a string in the file (stored in unicode or ASCII). other options can include contributing an old version of the file (find strings throughout to search for) or contirbute two different files produced by the same program (so start and end and anything between could be found).
if the file that was lost was undergoing active editing, there could be multiple copies on the drive, and their contents offset enough to permit automatic reassembling of the sections broken up by the filesystem. hybrid files can be made and the user could still assemble what is needed from full and part-files that were scavanged.
if the drive has physical damage the program cannot exit early due to unavailable data (a health map of access data rate could be supplied as a nice bonus), "…because of an I/O device error" (search will not tell me where on the drive it got down to when it found the error!).
(one thing I thought was can I write my own plugins?)
thanks, C