Best way to backup failing hard drive?

Voridian · Mar 27, 2018

I have a ~5 year old 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001-1CH164 that I'm pretty sure is failing and I'm having some issues with backing it up using the good old windows cut and paste. Its been several hours and its still discovering files. Is there any faster alternative?

Symptoms in case it matters:
Disappeared from device manager for a while
Computer constantly freezes
100% disk usage in task manager with read speed jumping between 0 and 200KB/s
SMART fail with Seatools Test Code D465D49 "possibly caused by problem sectors which are difficult to read"

Also its not my boot drive, I have windows 10 running on a kingston suv400s37120g SSD

popatim · Mar 27, 2018

I would not use cut andpaste. if the paste fails and the 'cut' works then you may find all those files gone and now you have to resort to other means to recover them.

Use copy & paste and then go back and delete if you still want to.

If you are deleting for security reasons then you are wasting your time; recovery software can still find them. Just drill a few holes thru the circular area of the drive to destroy the platters underneath and recycle the drive.

Your drive sounds like its in pretty bad shape. I would continue to use copy and paste but in smaller segments. Begin with the more important folders of things you do not want to lose. (family pictures and videos would be my first items) and work your way down to things that would be nice to have.

Voridian · Mar 27, 2018

So theres no way to avoid the constant freezing? Honestly i dont even understand why explorer.exe is constantly crashing when windows isnt even installed on this drive but it makes it a huge pain to transfer files.

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Best way to backup failing hard drive?

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