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Is it possible to save the current state in Testdisk after a scan, and then skip a subsequent scan and use the previous state? I have managed more than once to accidentally exit the app before I was able to complete what I was doing, and then need to start all over again.

Unfortunately this is not possible!

I have managed to get past my difficulties after scanning many times.Testdisk is a great tool, but I wish there was a prompt before throwing away hours of scanning. For example, one of the scans found a bunch of partitions and after I selected some partitions to save and it said what I had selected was valid. But when I went to write them and pressed Y to write them, it then said they weren't valid and threw away all the scan results. That seems like a bug to me. I worked around it by doing the scans multiple times and only saving one partition at a time which I then wrote out as an image; but this process took about 3 days. FWIW, there is nothing wrong with the drive other than the original partition table was lost (no bad sectors, etc.)

garyr wrote: 25 Sep 2023, 18:19 I have managed to get past my difficulties after scanning many times.Testdisk is a great tool, but I wish there was a prompt before throwing away hours of scanning. For example, one of the scans found a bunch of partitions and after I selected some partitions to save and it said what I had selected was valid.

If you think that there is a bug in Testdisk you have to put some effort into a readable bug report. There are lots of howto-websites like this one:
https://rubygarage.org/blog/how-to-writ ... bug-report

Be aware, that even a good bug report does not necessarily guarantees you a fix!

Furthermore your description is unclear. After reading your stuff a couple of times I don't know what you mean by saying "selected some partitions to save". Do you mean writing a new partition table onto the disk or do you want to copy the content of some partitions?!

But when I went to write them and pressed Y to write them, it then said they weren't valid and threw away all the scan results. That seems like a bug to me. I worked around it by doing the scans multiple times and only saving one partition at a time which I then wrote out as an image;

Again, what you do you mean?

but this process took about 3 days. FWIW, there is nothing wrong with the drive other than the original partition table was lost (no bad sectors, etc.)

If you are trying to save the content of partitions, your procedure is an unintended off-label use. You are supposed to duplicate your disk using ddrescue as described in the manual to have a backup.

There is a standard procedure to recover lost partitions:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step