Question What’s the safest way to recover data from a failing hard drive

[Gammazeth]

Hi everyone, yesterday I dropped my laptop and it didn’t want to turn back on. I immediately removed the hard drive, replaced it with a completely new one and installed the latest version of Ubuntu on it. Everything was working perfectly so the only damaged part of hardware was the hard drive. I then proceeded to plug it in my laptop as an external hard drive using a USB cable and Ubuntu detected it but a message saying that the disk is likely to fail soon popped up. When checking the content of the disc, it was basically intact. Thankfully, all the precious informations I need are stored in a specific folder (of approximately 80 GB if I remember correctly) and I was wondering what’s the safest way to recover it ? As of right now, I dragged and dropped one of the folders in my new drive but the transfer rate is way too slow (it varies from 80 kB/s to 400 kB/s). I know that time is limited and I shouldn’t put too much stress on that disk so what are your recommendations ? Should I make an image of the disk ? Should I just let it copy for a few days ? Should I do something else ?
Please help me

 

[punkncat]

Well...

The issue with an external drive caddy is that it is limited by its USB connection. The issue with putting this inside a PC is that there is a boot sector and unlikely to turn out not to cause issue. IMO, set the machine you hook it up to not to power down and utilize the external caddy to pull and pray it stays together long enough.

Makes a strong case of data backup, but often people wait until an event like this to make that realization. Good luck, hope it stays up long enough that you don't lose your files.

 

[Gammazeth]

So making an image of the failing drive isn’t a better option ? I should just pray that everything gets copied in time ?

 

[punkncat]

So making an image of the failing drive isn’t a better option ? I should just pray that everything gets copied in time ?

IMO, recovering the data you don't want to lose would be first priority. I don't have enough information to base a decision on making an image and especially in light of already having the system running again on a fresh install.

With a damaged or failing drive, there really only are a couple of choices available. Hope and pray, or pay.

 

[Gammazeth]

Alright, do you have a specific method for recovering the data or should I just continue to drag and drop ? I also noticed that it was failing to copy a lot of files that aren’t even corrupted since I’m able to open them properly…

 

[punkncat]

If the drive is allowing access and you can see the folder I would probably do a "copy/paste" operation first and see if it does so properly. I have had situations where pulling small bits at a time seemed to net decent results but also takes way more of your time and personal supervision.

I believe you said this was a Linux distro, so not sure if there is a utility similar to RoboCopy of which you could make a script to pull and verify the copy?

 

[Grobe]

So making an image of the failing drive isn’t a better option ? I should just pray that everything gets copied in time ?

There is no clear answer for this. But - considered you ha no backup (!) - I'd suggest you copy the most important files first, then the files you consider second most important, and so on. A hdd that is soon do be dead, can get broke at any time during the copy operation, and for disk image files - if this happens, you probably just end up with a corrupted disk image with no hope of retrieve any files.

If the drive is allowing access and you can see the folder I would probably do a "copy/paste" operation first and see if it does so properly.

Agree. Most important files first.

I believe you said this was a Linux distro, so not sure if there is a utility similar to RoboCopy of which you could make a script to pull and verify the copy?

The copy operation in most file managers in Linux support queuing natively, no need to additional tools such as is the case with windows.

 

[Gammazeth]

Thanks a lot for all your answers. I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should use rsync to transfer each file one by one and maybe automate the process. Do you have any suggestions ? I don’t know if I can supervise all the transfers as it is very time consuming…

 

[fzabkar]

The best tool is HDDSuperClone (now open source). The author has produced a Live CD with a GUI. It is a Linux tool. Windows tools are unsuitable because they interfere with the error recovery process.

HDDSuperClone is a multipass cloner. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass, and then attempts the more difficult sectors on subsequent passes.

That said, be prepared for your drive to fail completely during cloning.

Ddrescue is a similar free tool, also Linux based.

Attach the drive via SATA, if at all possible. The USB-SATA bridge firmware will interfere with the error recovery process.

 

[Grobe]

I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should use rsync to transfer each file one by one and maybe automate the process.

No, rsync is not the correct tool for the job - well, unless the destination of the files you're transferring is another Linux computer on the network and you use ssh for file transfer. rsync is a great tool, but I think not for this particular case.

But since you mention rsync - this has actually become my favorite tool I use to create backup with versioning, and also file transfer between computers on network,

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I second ddrescue. If you grab a copy of parted magic you can create a bootable USB drive to start up your laptop from, plug in your external that is the same size or preferably bigger, then tell ddrescue that you want to clone the failing drive without retrying bad sectors.

 

[USAFRet]

Note: whatever tool you use, you WILL need to recover to some other physical drive. A blank drive.

 

[PolarisSky]

Apart from the tools that were already mentioned, you can also use a Clonezilla live usb stick.
And as someone else also said, make sure you recover/image your drive to another blank drive.

With clonezilla you also have the option to clone each partition to its own image file.