Some of you may recall that I was having drive problems the other day. I was getting the data off my old drive and moving it to a new one when it started issuing bad sector and impending drive failure warnings. As a result, I failed to get the hidden files in my home Linux directory (the most critical data loss was my much of my sent email for the last three years). It was looking pretty grim. ddrescue, which is supposed to be a very powerful data-recovery tool, couldn’t see anything, and attempting to look at it with fdisk to see if the drive was even there just resulted in an overflow error. I took it to a local data-recovery guy, and he put his diagnostics on it, and told me that it was having a delay after the first 30g (of a 2T drive), and that he couldn’t do anything with it (though I think that he understood Windows much better than he did ext4). I was almost resolved to simply mourning the loss, or sending it to a specialist, with the potential of spending many hundreds of dollars and only getting back individual randomly named files with no file structure. But I tried one more thing.

I ran the program most of yesterday (it took from mid-morning until late evening to go through all two terabytes), but when it was done, the logical volume was restored, and the drive looked like new (it’s even possible that it will boot, though I haven’t tried it, and don’t really have any reason to). But I can’t recommend it more highly.

And yes, I will be backing up religiously, with a cron job every night (possibly also to my remote server).