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 imanol1898@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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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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[–] chkno@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] imanol1898@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.