Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Unstoppable Copier -- freeware that saved my bacon
mouser:
Interestingly the windows disk scanning/checking functions didn't seem to see anything wrong.. But a handful of files were unreadable due to hardware read failure on the hard disk. During my recovery attempts sometimes the drive just disconnected itself from the system and disapeared.
In the end I was able to get 99.99% of everything back.. Most of the disk was still working and the files that were corrupt I had backups of -- all but one which had some mail from one account that I had to do some manual work to recover.
All in all, it was pretty painless, but I was reminded of how much worse it could have been. The experience exposed a couple of holes in my backup plans, and reminded me how important having full drive images are to making recovery from a crash a painless process. Because of that, I am going to increase the frequency of my full drive backups from once a month to once a week.
alsamaster:
And how do you get the list of files it skipped?-mouser (May 10, 2018, 12:32 AM)
--- End quote ---
Well, tbh, haven't looked at the logging of it since I'd just use Beyond Compare to do a directory comparison.
The verbose switch does show skipped files plus you can output to a log file, (console, log file, or both).
--- Code: Text ---::: Logging Options ::: /L :: List only - don't copy, timestamp or delete any files. /X :: report all eXtra files, not just those selected. /V :: produce Verbose output, showing skipped files. /TS :: include source file Time Stamps in the output. /FP :: include Full Pathname of files in the output. /BYTES :: Print sizes as bytes. /NS :: No Size - don't log file sizes. /NC :: No Class - don't log file classes. /NFL :: No File List - don't log file names. /NDL :: No Directory List - don't log directory names. /NP :: No Progress - don't display percentage copied. /ETA :: show Estimated Time of Arrival of copied files. /LOG:file :: output status to LOG file (overwrite existing log). /LOG+:file :: output status to LOG file (append to existing log). /UNILOG:file :: output status to LOG file as UNICODE (overwrite existing log). /UNILOG+:file :: output status to LOG file as UNICODE (append to existing log). /TEE :: output to console window, as well as the log file. /NJH :: No Job Header. /NJS :: No Job Summary. /UNICODE :: output status as UNICODE.
Main reason I guess for using robocopy is that it can copy pretty much everything to do with a file, NTFS ACLS, Owner, auditing, and probably the ADS.
Could also multi-thread it, (/MT:x), but probably not the thing to do on a suspect HDD.
-4wd (May 10, 2018, 12:36 AM)
--- End quote ---
Hello there,
Im new here. First I would thank you for this nice site and the tools and advise you provide to the others.
I also wanted to suggest a freeware tool dubbed Robomirror, which basically is a GUI for the robocopy tool. :Thmbsup:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/robomirror/
Cheers.
mouser:
Thanks for that, Robomirror looks useful.
Shades:
Interestingly the windows disk scanning/checking functions didn't seem to see anything wrong.. But a handful of files were unreadable due to hardware read failure on the hard disk. During my recovery attempts sometimes the drive just disconnected itself from the system and disapeared.
In the end I was able to get 99.99% of everything back.. Most of the disk was still working and the files that were corrupt I had backups of -- all but one which had some mail from one account that I had to do some manual work to recover.
All in all, it was pretty painless, but I was reminded of how much worse it could have been. The experience exposed a couple of holes in my backup plans, and reminded me how important having full drive images are to making recovery from a crash a painless process. Because of that, I am going to increase the frequency of my full drive backups from once a month to once a week.
-mouser (May 10, 2018, 12:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
CHKDSK moves files around whenever it encounters a file that is stored in a location on the hard disk that has been marked as bad. That is like fixing the symptom, and then forgetting to apply the cure. If you have a spare computer that can boot from pen drive or CD, use the MHDD tool to really find out what is really wrong with your hard disk, possibly even adjust the capacity if the error(s) are located near to the beginning or end of the hard disk. By doing that, you can repurpose the disk again (for non-essential stuff) for years to come.
You have to boot from the MHDD disk and tests can take a long time (hours!), depending on the storage capacity of the disk and the speed of the onboard hard disk controller from the computer you use to run MHDD on. However, afterwards you will have a very good idea what is really wrong in a way that no Windows based tool and/or S.M.A.R.T. technology can ever compare with.
4wd:
By doing that, you can repurpose the disk again (for non-essential stuff) for years to come.-Shades (May 11, 2018, 09:34 AM)
--- End quote ---
This is still spinning it's wheels after an additional 6 years, when it first occurred I just told it to initiate what passes for a Low Level Format these days to map out the bad blocks.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version