Recovery of files from a bad hard drive

[Yatti420]

Hello everybody,

Recently I posted regarding ZFS pool being degraded and was told to not use the drive until I could get a replacement.. Today I am attempting to backup the bad drive to a new seagate 2tb drive.. The initial WD 2tb wd20ears deceided to start acting up (freenas showed zfs checksum errors) and alot of i/o issues trying to copy.. I've broken down the original server and rebuilt a new one with a little more ram.. Backed up my second set of drives fine via cp command.. No issues.. Now I am back to the original set.. Upon bootup it's taking a very long time to mount local filesystems.. Now with the new server SMART detected the WD as being bad..

I'm just curious on how to cleanly backup the bad hard drive.. It appears I can still see the files mounted its just very slow.. Degraded to say the least..

Thanks,

 

[cyberjock]

I'd try attaching another hard drive temporarily and try to do a 'cp' from the bad drive to the new drive. I'm not sure if cp will copy files that are unreadable or not, but I would just let it run as long as it takes(it may not ever finish unfortunately :( ). If the data is worth $2k+ you could sent the drive to one of those hard drive recovery companies and possibly get your data back. I'm not sure if those companies do ZFS partitions so you'd have to ask if you decide to pay for your data.

In either case, I wouldn't trust the data you recover as valid until manually verified to be good. You probably have some good files, but there will certainly be some bad ones in there too.

Sorry you lost your data. I've seen it happen to a few people personally including myself once and it's never pretty. It definitely sobers you up to how awesome backups are! Now I keep a 2TB drive at a friends house with my most important data encrypted with Truecrypt so if my house goes up in smoke I have my most valuable personal data. It's REALLY handy to have full color scans of your birth certificate, driver's license, etc. Some places will take color copies(not sure why as that defies my logic) to help you get your life back in place.

 

[Yatti420]

I'd try attaching another hard drive temporarily and try to do a 'cp' from the bad drive to the new drive. I'm not sure if cp will copy files that are unreadable or not, but I would just let it run as long as it takes(it may not ever finish unfortunately :( ). If the data is worth $2k+ you could sent the drive to one of those hard drive recovery companies and possibly get your data back. I'm not sure if those companies do ZFS partitions so you'd have to ask if you decide to pay for your data.

In either case, I wouldn't trust the data you recover as valid until manually verified to be good. You probably have some good files, but there will certainly be some bad ones in there too.

Sorry you lost your data. I've seen it happen to a few people personally including myself once and it's never pretty. It definitely sobers you up to how awesome backups are! Now I keep a 2TB drive at a friends house with my most important data encrypted with Truecrypt so if my house goes up in smoke I have my most valuable personal data. It's REALLY handy to have full color scans of your birth certificate, driver's license, etc. Some places will take color copies(not sure why as that defies my logic) to help you get your life back in place.

Using rsync seems to work well.. Hoping to get everything off without errors.. The CP command showed alot of IO when copying.. Rsync is showing the files moving but unsure if errors?

Thanks,