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Unstoppable Copier -- freeware that saved my bacon
mouser:
Today I had a hard drive crash.. Not fun.
Turned out that most of the files were still readable, the problem was that the handful among the 100,000 files that were not readable were causing major troubles.. Causing windows to hang when trying to access them, and causing all attempts to backup/image the drive to fail.
These days, looking for "free" software is an utter nightmare. As most of you know from experience, most "free" software nowadays is basically non-functional trial software whose main job is to trick you and then make you buy the full version after you install a bunch of adware.
Imagine my surprise at finding an amazing piece of real freeware: Unstoppable Copier.
This wonderful savior of a program let me very quickly back a copy of all of the files on the hard drive, SKIPPING over the bad, unreadable ones, and giving me a nice list of the ones it couldn't copy.
It has some functions to try to repeatedly read corrupt files, but I have to admit that my hard drive was not having any of that. No matter, the fact that I was able to quickly copy all of the readable files was enough to save me and let me just restore the bad ones from a separate backup.
This is a keeper.
It's donationware, and truly fully functional and free. I made a donation.
4wd:
As an alternative there's always the included Windows robocopy:
--- Code: Text ---robocopy <srce> <dest> /MIR /R:0 /W:0
Mirror copy, no read retries, zero wait time.
--- Code: Text ---/MIR :: MIRror a directory tree (equivalent to /E plus /PURGE)./R:n :: number of Retries on failed copies: default 1 million./W:n :: Wait time between retries: default is 30 seconds.
mouser:
And how do you get the list of files it skipped?
4wd:
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.
Stoic Joker:
How "crashed" was the hard drive? Chkdsk [drive]: /R has been good to me in the past.
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