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Best Software for Byte-to-Byte Backup?

Scott Baret

Scott Baret

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 6, 2011
110
121
I'm looking to make a byte-to-byte image of a hard drive to recover some data. Long story short, the disk refuses to mount by any means, including through Terminal. It's a 500MB hard drive (actual hard drive, not SSD). It's in a known good external enclosure and I'm attempting to recover data from it for a friend.

I found a program called Disk Drill, but I don't trust it. It just looks and feels shady, plus it's estimating that it will take over 3000 hours to make the byte-to-byte image.

What can I use that isn't Disk Drill and that will allow me to make an image in maybe 3 hours?
 
I can't get TestDisk to work...it won't recognize any disks other than images. Do I need to use an image file with it?

Should add that I tried this as the root user too.
 
Last edited:
I'm personally a big fan of ddrescue, it's basically a friendlier version of dd made specifically for data recovery that can retry and/or skip sectors with errors, allow multiple passes of recovery, and has a nice progress display.

It logs which sectors were and weren't successfully imaged on its first pass, so you can make a quick image that skips and pads all sectors with read errors (to avoid getting stuck or further damaging the drive) and then go back later and ask it to retry all the sectors it couldn't read the first time around.
 
Scott Baret said:
I'm looking to make a byte-to-byte image of a hard drive to recover some data. Long story short, the disk refuses to mount by any means, including through Terminal. It's a 500MB hard drive (actual hard drive, not SSD). It's in a known good external enclosure and I'm attempting to recover data from it for a friend.

I found a program called Disk Drill, but I don't trust it. It just looks and feels shady, plus it's estimating that it will take over 3000 hours to make the byte-to-byte image.

What can I use that isn't Disk Drill and that will allow me to make an image in maybe 3 hours?
Click to expand...

disk drill worked for me. I made an image first with dd an recovered files from the image.
 
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