Wednesday, February 25, 2009

ddrescue to the rescue

So two weeks ago my HD did a huge CRACK and it stopped working. The system did not boot up and it just did CRACK CRACK CRACK all the time. So i browsed a bit and saw that ddrescue was a dd variant able to skip failing sectors. So i picked up a new HD the double size of the old one and a RIP CD and started the process of dumping the old filesystem into a file. Two weeks after ddrescue told me i had lost 77MB and thankfully after dumping the file into a newly created filesystem and some fsck later i did not lost anything important.

So thanks a lot ddrescue devels!
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5 comments:

  1. UnknownThursday, February 26, 2009 12:32:00 AM

    Very nice find but no backup?

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  2. AnonymousThursday, February 26, 2009 1:41:00 AM

    Sounds like you're in need of a backup solution!

    I suggest rdiff-backup ( http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ )

    However.... I'm working on an experimental and stupidly simple KDE backup and recovery system based on rdiff-backup. Hopefully it will see the light of day sometime in the near future.

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  3. AnonymousThursday, February 26, 2009 9:23:00 AM

    Fantastic! Thanks for the tip.
    (I hope I won't use it though ;) )

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  4. AnonymousThursday, February 26, 2009 9:50:00 AM

    Thanks for the suggestion.

    What gave you the confidence to use this potentially dangerous method, as opposed to sending it to one of those recovery services?

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  5. Albert Astals CidThursday, February 26, 2009 10:30:00 PM

    @Backup people: Too tedious, people just do backups after a hardware fail, it gets boring afterwards, though i'm thinking of a RAID setup.

    @Jason: I'm not rich and the data was not that critical so a recovery service is not an option, besides Linux tools have always worked for me, so why would i need an "extra" of confidence before using them?

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