HD is dying: Any recovery thoughts?

nelsonmay wrote:

I totally understand. I am trying to copy off the data, but it just keeps giving me and error. Apparently it no longer has read and write capabilities.

I have an old recovery program that works on Leopard. I have a partitioned disk that has leopard on this mac. the only problem is I have 1.4TB of info and no where to send all the data. The program is old and just spits data all over the place with nothing left in directories. Any new recovery programs to recommend for High Sierra?

There are no good macOS data recovery programs which can handle all the errors your failing hard drive is producing. These data recovery utilities are mainly designed for recovering accidentally deleted data and not for recovering data from a failing drive. The more you attempt to retrieve files the worse you are making the drive failure. Soon even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover the data. Contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. Both of these vendors are recommended by Apple and other OEMs and both provide free estimates. If your data is that important, then this is your best option at recovering it.

I've performed data recovery on hundreds of hard drives over the years so I know how difficult it can be to recover data from a failing hard drive. It requires special software to perform a bit for bit clone which can also ignore the errors produced by the failing drive. This means you need to have an equal size or larger drive for the clone. Then you need another drive for actually transferring your files from the clone since it will need to be erased after you recover the data. There is no guarantee even this special software will be successful and you will have destroyed the failing hard drive in the process. By the time you purchase all these drives you will be spending lots of money which could have been spent on a professional data recovery service which would have a much better chance at successfully recovering the data.

In the future make sure to have regular system backups.

if you can't copy data off the drive it's probably had it.

you can send it to a clean room if the data is critical but that is no guarantee they will get anything off it, and you pay either way.

Any rotational drive more than 5 years old is on borrowed time

Any recovery software you can get is going to be completely useless when the drive is physically failing.

The time to backup your data is before something fails, not after...

There are data recovery services out there that can try to get the data off the drive if it's that important... And by that important I mean several hundred to several thousand $$ with no guarantee of success...

Sorry, if you don't have any backups you may be out of luck. Some of the file recovery apps might help you, you'll have to setup a new drive anyway, so maybe try that. Stating the obvious, TimeMachine is your friend, if you use it.

If no backups, consider it a chance for a fresh start ???

Going forward, consider an SSD to improve performance, installing the system and apps, as well as "current" projects, then use an external HDD to clone the internal SSD, and for extra storage for older non-current stuff, and have a backup system that will backup both the SSD and HDD in iterations (via TimeMachine ;-).

SuperDuper <https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html> is another app, like CCC, and both are mostly used for maintaining a bootable backup. If you are willing to invest in a drive that can serve that purpose (advised if your Mac is mission critical and you can’t spare hours or days rebuilding from TimeMachine (and/or iCloud or other cloud based backups) certainly use SD or CCC. Given TimeMachine is free, from Apple, and integrated into the OS, certainly starting there makes sense, even if you use one of the above.

If you plan to replace the capacity of the original HDD, AND setup a TimeMachine backup, you are going to need two new large drives, so that part of the equation should already be a factor.

Now I’m not suggesting a service such as DriveSavers isn’t more capable than some of the software solutions available for purchase (is there really anyway of knowing?), but you might read this to get yourself better up to speed with some options:

https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/best-data-recovery-apps-3681531/

Dancin&#39; Brook wrote:

Now I’m not suggesting a service such as DriveSavers isn’t more capable than some of the software solutions available for purchase (is there really anyway of knowing?), but you might read this to get yourself better up to speed with some options:

https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/best-data-recovery-apps-3681531/

If a user has a physically failing drive and does not have a backup, then a professional data recovery service is the best option. As I mentioned in my earlier post the majority of data recovery software is only meant to recover accidentally deleted data from a working drive. Most software is unable to deal with the numerous errors produced by a failing hard drive. The data recovery software listed is perfectly fine when data has been accidentally erased from a physically good drive or if a physically good drive has a corrupted file system.

The more a person tries to recover data from a physically failing drive the more damaged the drive becomes. It just makes things worse. I know this from personal experience at successfully recovering data from hundreds of physically failing hard drives. Most techs do not know how to properly recover data from a failing hard drive.

FYI, for anyone interested in recovering data from a physically failing hard drive, then you need to use the free open source command line tool GNU ddrescue. This is the only utility I know of that can skip past the bad blocks on a drive and recover the data and create a bit for bit clone of an unmounted drive. After retrieving the easy to access data, the utility can be run again to scrape the damaged portions of the drive to attempt to recover even more data. I don't like using this utility on a Mac since macOS tends to get in the way with a physically failing drive. I have a dedicated Linux system set up to perform data recovery with this method although a Knoppix Linux USB boot drive can easily work on a Mac as GNU ddrescue is included with it. Sometimes the cloned drive will need Disk Utility or other software to repair the file system or even recover files from the clone, but now you have a physically good drive which isn't producing errors anymore so those regular utilities will now work.

You usually only get one shot at recovering data from a physically failing drive so a user must choose the method of data recovery very carefully.

“There are no good macOS data recovery programs...” vs “As I mentioned in my earlier post the majority of data recovery software is only meant to recover accidentally deleted data from a working drive. Most software...”

“No good” vs “Most” and “ Majority”

All I’m offering are something’s to consider trying, and learning more. You don’t need to offer a rebuttal.

Besides Time Machine use Carbon Copy Cloner...

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html