My HDD is failing and manually copying files to an external HDD is taking forever. We’re talking about KB/s transfer speeds. I have around 1.3TB in it, but only really need around 400-500gb. I’m afraid this method is only hastening its death.
I used to use a dos program, Norton Ghost, to clone partitions. Would a similar program be better for backing up my files vs copy/pasting? I feel like the manual copying is wearing the drive out faster. On the other hand, cloning might just copy over corrupted files on bad sectors and all (I know nothing about this so I could be wrong).
Thanks in advance.
A block-by-block copy would likely be faster, however it could also not work at all, depending on the type of damage. Keep in mind that if it works, you will have the damaged files on the new disk as well, where you can try to repair them. May I kindly suggest Clonezilla?
How big is the drive? If you want 500 GB from a 10 TB drive, taking an image of the full drive would mean reading 20 times more data. Asking a failing drive to read a bunch of unallocated space that you don’t care about isn’t great.
But, sequential reading is very important to rotational hard drive performance.
So it mostly comes down to how sequential your 500 GB of important data is likely to be. If your 500 GB of important data is a hundred 5 GB files, they’re probably mostly stored sequentially on the disk and you would do better to attempt to recover them through the filesystem (mounted read-only). If your 500 GB of important data is in a hundred million 4k files, reading them out through the filesystem will likely be much slower and rougher on the drive than imaging the whole drive.
Cloning, but only with proper software. ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. Can’t be done under Windows due to Windows limitations.
Thanks. I’m using HDDSuperClone. Took about an hour to clone 0.15%. I am not hopeful at all the HDD will survive this process haha.
I want to be able to leave it on overnight but I keep getting “skip resets” that stops the process and requires a manual restart.
I’d stop and ask on r/datarecovery, consider professional recovery. Might be a mechanical issue.
And this, friends, is your regular reminder to have a backup system in place before the problems start.