Want to clone failing western digital drive

[rsarceno]

I've experienced situations where the very act of cloning pushes a drive over the edge from "failing" to "failed" with what's been recovered as a result of the clone attempt being useless (or at least not the most important data).

There are times when you have a limited window of opportunity to snag the most important file(s) - which are usually megabytes and quickly copied rather than gigabytes requiring hours of drive thrashing to recover.

If cloning is done properly, it will first go to the drive (single pass) and try to get the good data. With little demand on the drive as possible. The second pass is more demanding and the third pass is more than the second attempt and so on working the drive to death.

As a good practice, why not clone and do at least the first pass with minimized impact to the drive. Then do your specific find and restore process second. At least if the HDD become completely inaccessible, you where able to at least get the data that was easily recoverable.

 

[computerdoc]

Would it start reading from the device if I gave it an ignore errors option?