Score:1

Recovery of failing HDD with ddrescue: "remaining time 37days"?

kr flag

I've got this important 600GB music collection on a failing external HDD, which give me problems for accessing the files, not always but often.

I've started ddrescue to copy the whole drive to a healthy one, and after 12hours running it gives me a remaining time of 37 days.

Any advice? I'm a total beginner with IT stuff.

Extract of the ongoing process:

~$ sudo ddrescue --try-again --force --verbose /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdb1 /home/yourdog/Desktop/logfile
GNU ddrescue 1.23
About to copy 1000 GBytes from '/dev/sdc1' to '/dev/sdb1'
    Starting positions: infile = 0 B,  outfile = 0 B
    Copy block size: 128 sectors       Initial skip size: 19584 sectors
Sector size: 512 Bytes
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
     ipos:  245366 MB, non-trimmed:  118116 kB,  current rate:       0 B/s
     opos:  245366 MB, non-scraped:        0 B,  average rate:   4513 kB/s
non-tried:  788966 MB,  bad-sector:        0 B,    error rate:       0 B/s
  rescued:  211116 MB,   bad areas:        0,        run time: 12h 59m 37s
pct rescued:   21.10%, read errors:     3348,  remaining time: 37d 19h 48m
                              time since last successful read:          0s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)

After two days processing, i look at the content of my output drive, and it says its empty. is it normal? here some pictures:

source drive (failing): enter image description here

output drive (healthy) you can see its 0,0% full. is it ok?: enter image description here

and full screen of the ongoing process

in flag
Recovery speeds depend greatly on the interface being used and the number of errors being encountered at a given point in time. If the errors consume the first 5% of the disk and the remaining 95% is good, then the estimate will be wildly wrong until `ddrescue` has more statistics to work with. Give the process some time. It may not need 37 days.
kr flag
As a side note: I dont care about losing files, or having corrupted files in after the recovery. I just want to be able to access again as much as possible of this music collection, and in the best case to be able have a list of which files copied correctly and which ones a are corrupted. The problem now with my failing HDD is that it very often freezes when i try to access the files, ad it slows down a lot my computer.
kr flag
thank you matigo, i'll leave it more time. Any problem with interrupting the process and start it again later with the same command line? maybe i'll try to leave this rescue running on another cumputer and not my laptop...
in flag
The more often you stop it, the more time the process will take. To the best of my knowledge, you cannot resume recovery from a previous point …
Score:0
us flag

ddrescue will resume a recovery session from the point it left off when you specify a mapfile. You have specified /home/yourdog/Desktop/logfile as your map file. Make sure to include it in all ddrescue commands when working on this drive.

From the man pages at https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html#Introduction

If you use the mapfile feature of ddrescue, the data are rescued very efficiently, (only the blocks needed are read). Also you may interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. The mapfile is an essential part of ddrescue's effectiveness. Use it unless you know what you are doing.

kr flag
Thank you Pircs! All as you said with the mapfile/logfile...
kr flag
At the moment after 2 days of recovery i'm left with 10days of remaining time (and 31% of pct rescued). Still at pass 5... Any comment on that? Is it worth it to wait and finish the recovery, or it means my drive is too corrupted?
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