Question Currupted Files on USB Drive, Backup before trying to fix

[gogowe]

Hello,

Short Question:
Can someone recommend a way how to backup an USB Flash Drive with corrupted files on it, the safest way?

Long Question:
I have a USB flash drive with corrupted directories (they are displayed as files now) which I would try to recover.
But because there are important data on them, I want to make sure the whole thing is backuped before I start to fiddle with it and cause even more damage.
I thought I use Linux or Clonezilla and just clone the stick.
But I am a little bit afraid I will damage the stick even more by reading these data. Do you have any recommendations/tips?

Thanks in advance

 

[rgd1101]

what kind of usb drive?
flash? hdd? ssd?

 

[gogowe]

what kind of usb drive?
flash? hdd? ssd?

USB flash drive
Sorry for that, I edited my question

 

[USAFRet]

1. Clone it to some other flash drive of appropriate size. Attempt recovery on that.
2. Why was this flash the the only location for "important data" ? That should never be the case.

 

[USAFRet]

How to?
Possibly ddrescue

Ddrescue - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Data recovery tool

www.gnu.org

 

[gogowe]

That should never be the case.

Yeah thats also what I always tell these people. And the next day they come and ask for help to recover their data...

Possibly ddrescue

Yes ddrescue or chkdsk would be my first attempts after cloning the drive.

Clone it to some other flash drive of appropriate size. Attempt recovery on that.

This is exactly what I want to do first. Do you have some recomandations how to clone it with reduced risk of more curruption? Is maybe Clonezilla the right tool for this?

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah, you could try CloneZilla, to a blank flash drive.

 

[gogowe]

Ok, great thank you!
Then I will give it a try. I formatted an other USB Flash Drive completely with the same size, same format and checked it for health with HD Tune . I probably clone it to this drive.

At the beginning, I wanted to create an .iso of the corrupted drive, but I will clone it entirely first to the fresh formatted one.

 

[gogowe]

It did not work as intended.Clonezilla and DD could not clone the flash Drive. I created a dump (.bin) of the drive with "images" and wrote the image on another flash drive.
There I could recover some deleted files with Testdisk/Photorec, but not all of them and not specifically from the corrupted directories.
chkdsk did not work, but tells me that there are some errors.
Now I am testing ddrescue.

Should I try these steps again with the original drive?