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?
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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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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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.
drive is only 3Tb. They’re mostly photos, audiobooks, and docs. I’d say file size can range from a few MBs to as big as maybe 500Mb.
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.
It does seem that way. None of the files are critical enough to warrant spending on a professional.
Docs are synced with OneDrive, and photos, I probably have copies elsewhere. Real loss will be the audiobooks I've collected over the years.
And this, friends, is your regular reminder to have a backup system in place before the problems start.