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] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Cloning, but only with proper software. ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. Can't be done under Windows due to Windows limitations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd stop and ask on r/datarecovery, consider professional recovery. Might be a mechanical issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.