Drive OR filesystem probably faulty - should I do a full HDD image or backup file-by-file?

aharu

Honorable
Jan 10, 2014
7
0
10,510
I have a 1TB NTFS-formatted drive 95% filled with data that has not yet been backed up, the data on it is fresh and is very valuable to me. Been running in a Windows 7 machine. Now, some errors appeared - I'm not going to mention all of it because it's irrelevant at this point in time. A folder worth 400GB of data with 350 folders all of a sudden disappeared (I thought), but I later found it in a very random folder. This is one of the things, plus some odd error messages. Worth noting is that the data seems OK and intact, I have found no broken files as of yet. I have not used chkdsk, knowing that COULD make things worse.

The machine is now turned off and I'm just waiting to get the harddrive. I will not start it again. This is where I need help. Should I...

- Clonezilla (I don't even know how that works, but I could learn)

- Mount drive read-only in linux and make a full-disk image (bit-by-bit)

- Mount drive read-only in linux and copy everything file by file to a secure location

- Other options, please? Is there an option in linux which can create a 1:1-drive-image which could be mounted in Windows later on, or can they only be mounted in linux itself?


Remember:
1) I dont know if it's a software failure, a failing harddrive or a corrupt filesystem. I don't really want to find out, until everything is backed up.
2) There is a lot of data, 1 TB, hundreds of thousands of files (literally).
3) No matter whats wrong, I'm considering I have one chance to rescue the data, so I have to pick wisely, thats why I'm asking you guys.

I would really appreciate any help I could get here...

THANKS



 

aharu

Honorable
Jan 10, 2014
7
0
10,510


No man, this driver won't see Windows until it's backed up properly, I'm deciding between Clonezilla and SystemRescueCD... No more advice for me?

 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
I would grab a 2tb drive, they are the best value anyways, then do both. Make an file copy and then an image of the drive. You can always run recovery against the image, saving your possibly defective drive for sending out should it come to that.