basic help with safecopy

I have a drive with "Many Bad Sectors". After much deliberation I've chosen to try recovering with safecopy (the choices of tools are overwhelming, and they are all just as cryptic to me - but I digress).

There aren't any tutorials explaining the basic concepts of running safecopy. Hopefully my questions are simple enough to answer quickly. They go like this:

• Can the operation of safecopy be as simple as running it three times (once for each of its "stages")?


• Do I run each "stage" into the same output file (e.g., harddrive.img)? Does it mount the image file and continue to add recovered files to it?


• Is it copying empty space into the image file (i.e., do I need a destination that is as big as the source drive, or simply as big as the data)?


• 
  

  Is it truly copying the drive (directory structure and all), or just file dumping?

  
  

  Thanks