## 9 Saving the mapfile in case of trouble ¶

The mapfile is an essential part of ddrescue’s effectiveness. Without a mapfile, ddrescue can’t resume a rescue, only reinitiate it. Given that a difficult rescue may take days to complete, it would be a serious drawback if the mapfile were lost because of a solvable problem like a lack of space on the device the mapfile is written to.

In case of trouble writing the mapfile, ddrescue prints a message like this:

    Error writing mapfile 'mapfile': No space left on device
    Fix the problem and press ENTER to retry,
                         or E+ENTER for an emergency save and exit,
                         or Q+ENTER to abort.

You may try to fix the problem, for example deleting some files to make room for the mapfile, and press `Return` to retry.

If the problem can’t be fixed, you may press `e` followed by `Return` to try an emergency save and exit. Ddrescue tries to write the mapfile to the file `ddrescue.map` in the current directory or, if this fails, to `$HOME/ddrescue.map`. If the mapfile is written successfully, ddrescue exits with status 1. Else it prints the above message again.

Or you may press `q` followed by `Return` to quit and exit with status 1. In this case the content of the mapfile is lost.