You should take it to a data recovery specialist if the data is really really important but for lightly-damaged sectors, you want ddrescue (oldie but goodie) or HDDSuperClone (no longer developed) or OpenSuperClone (fork of HDDSuperClone, more actively developed).
You can combine some of these tools with commercial programs like dmde, UFS Explorer, or R-Studio - to target specific files for a quick result - but basically it’s best to get a full disk image off the bad drive onto another drive/image.
I used ddrescue for a failing drive of not critical stuff, and had great success. Lots of guides online. If I were doing it again though, I would NOT image the whole drive – just the partition of interest. That greatly simplifies running fsck on the image and mounting it to recover the files.
Yep, I guess it depends on how much data of interest is on the drive. You can hook it up to dmde with a ddrescue/OpenSuperClone-mounted drive, which can let you index the filesystem while it streams content to the backup image. It reads and remembers sectors already copied, and you can target specific files/folders so you don’t have to touch most of the drive.
Maybe… I have a couple of hard drives to rescue and I need to figure out how to approach it
You should take it to a data recovery specialist if the data is really really important but for lightly-damaged sectors, you want ddrescue (oldie but goodie) or HDDSuperClone (no longer developed) or OpenSuperClone (fork of HDDSuperClone, more actively developed).
You can combine some of these tools with commercial programs like dmde, UFS Explorer, or R-Studio - to target specific files for a quick result - but basically it’s best to get a full disk image off the bad drive onto another drive/image.
I used ddrescue for a failing drive of not critical stuff, and had great success. Lots of guides online. If I were doing it again though, I would NOT image the whole drive – just the partition of interest. That greatly simplifies running fsck on the image and mounting it to recover the files.
Yep, I guess it depends on how much data of interest is on the drive. You can hook it up to dmde with a ddrescue/OpenSuperClone-mounted drive, which can let you index the filesystem while it streams content to the backup image. It reads and remembers sectors already copied, and you can target specific files/folders so you don’t have to touch most of the drive.
I’ve used “getdataback” many times by Runtime software and it has worked the best for me over others I’ve tried.