Oh goodie. A couple weeks ago, the backup drive for my gaming PC failed, which isn’t too big a deal; I’d been meaning to upgrade it to a larger one anyway.
Then this morning, I noticed that my Linux box’s HD activity light was stuck on. Turned out that my main storage drive was failing, and it was stuck on accessing the hard drive. I have a separate backup drive for this system, but the failure started while it was mid-backup, so the backup is incomplete. And then, for the final kick in the pants, I noticed that there are also bad blocks on the backup drive, so who knows how that’ll affect trying to restore from it.
Fortunately I’m paranoid and I have a second backup drive that I rotate with this one and store offsite, so that backup drive should still be fully intact. Unfortunately, I am also lazy, and it’s been a while since I swapped drives, so it’s going to be an old backup. This is primarily just a ‘media’ drive and all my important personal stuff is on a different drive and largely duplicated on my laptop, at least. There are also a lot of files on the failing drive that weren’t included in the backup since they took up too much space and could be re-obtained if needed. Those are primarily DVD rips, but it’s going to be super-annoying if I have to dig my DVDs out of the closet and re-rip them.
I’d still like to recover as much as I can, though. So, recovering from this is going to be an exercise in trying to reconcile a) an intact but fairly old backup, b) a recent but incomplete and potentially corrupt backup, and c) what I can scrape off the failing drive before it completely gives out. Fun.
I started copying some files off the failing drive and got a bunch of stuff including my music collection and non-Windows gaming files (mainly a lot of Minecraft servers and worlds, and emulation stuff), but then an error hit and I can no longer access the root directory of that partition, so I can’t even get at any of the intact files anymore. So, now I’m ‘dd’ing and compressing the raw partition of the failing drive onto a spare external drive so I can go at it with more in-depth tools later on. Though at its current rate of 364 kB/s, it’ll only take another, uh, 127 days or so. (Hopefully it’ll get past the damaged part and speed up soon.)
Except I don’t really have anywhere I can un-‘dd’ it to right now, since it’s a rather large drive. Guess it’s time to start buying large hard drives in bulk…