Data Recovery from BIG hard drives!?!?

[Pete W.]

Hi there, all,
 
My lovely but shy assistant and I are currently attempting to recover data from a friend’s hard drive.  (Well, she is the one doing the actual work.)
 
There is a bit of a problem:  The drive is 3 Terabytes in size and it’s in an enclosure that only permits USB-3 access, we can’t employ eSATA that might have permitted a faster data rate.  The recovery software we initially tried was ‘Recuva’ (paid version) which eventually announced that it needed fifteen days and rising!  We have abandoned ‘Recuva’ and are currently  trying ‘EaseUS’ (free version) and that, so far, has found nearly 4 GB of data and estimates it needs almost 8 hours.
 
A desirable quality of recovery software, bearing in mind the size of hard drive common these days, would be the ability to shut down the process and the computer and get a good night’s sleep before resuming the next and subsequent days.  The software suppliers don’t seem to mention this aspect of things in their specifications!
 
If any of you know of recovery software that can be operated in several contiguous sessions, please share – we prefer to shut down our computers overnight!

A similar time penalty is involved when 'purging' a big hard drive using the software that does successive over-writes with pseudo-random sequences!  Seven passes plus verify over 3 Terabytes of free space takes an awful long time!!!!  And the software I use can do 35 passes!!!!!!
 

[awemawson]

I'd just leave it running Pete.

Is it the fire risk or noise that's concerning you?

At any one time I have four PC's running  24/7 in various parts of the establishment, and two of them (in different buildings) back each other up overnight across the network.

[Pete.]

I leave mine running too. 4 years 9 months since original install and it only gets rebooted for cleaning or other maintenance.

[hanermo]

I always leave all pcs running 24x7.
They last longer and break less that way.

I have no idea what sw mentioned is "better".
I am pretty sure none of it is very efficient.

[mc]

Why can't you take the drive out the enclosure?

Any USB drives I've had, are simply SATA drives in a box with an interface.

[Pete W.]

Why can't you take the drive out the enclosure?

Any USB drives I've had, are simply SATA drives in a box with an interface.

 

In answer to your question: our approach has been to proceed cautiously and with the minimum invasion of a drive that is not our property.  I concede that formatting the drive and then running two different recovery packages might not be considered to fit with that!!!  (The two recovery packages we have tried both require that the drive (or the partition) is formatted before they will run.)

In response to your comment about drives in enclosures: that was, until recently, my experience and similarly before that with PATA drives.  However, we recently had a Western Digital 'Passport' drive through our hands.  They are built with the USB interface integral with the drive.  Also, WD make a drive intended for use with the Raspberry Pi that I also believe has its connection with the outside world integral with the drive electronics.  (I make that statement on the basis of studying WD's advertisements - I haven't actually held such a drive in my hands.)   

[mc]

I did wonder if somebody had managed to safe a few pence by integrating things even more.

[John Swift]

yes
Western Digital "my pasport"

     john

[hermetic]

Hi, in olden days we used to install another drive with a clean copy of windoze whatever, set the damaged drive as a slave, then access it from the new master drive, and get at the data that way, much quicker, but it does not get you into damaged files. Dont know if this applies with sata drives, and of course if the drive r/w heads or mechanism is damaged, yer stuffed. It is possible to change the drive board, but it must be absolutely identical to the one on the drive! We are advancing fast into the digital dark ages, I was considering all the photos of my workshop refurbish, 7 years worth, which would be lost if my 3Tb drive went "up the pictures"!

[seadog]

This is the problem nowadays with the amount of data it's possible to need to store. I've just mirrored my system drive and keep the rest of my files on a RAID 1 NAS.