Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Is it better to clone a failing HDD than manually backing it up via copy/paste? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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?