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I'd have thought if the drive is failing that even this may have issues and, at worst, copy corrupted blocks.
That's a good point. As for now, the drive is still uploading folders to cloud storage, although very slowly. I have managed so far to preseve a satisfactory chunk of a much larger chunk.
 
OP wrote:
"As for now, the drive is still uploading folders to cloud storage"

If these folders are important, why aren't you copying them to another drive?
Could the upload to "cloud storage" be what is slowing things down...?
 
OP wrote:
"As for now, the drive is still uploading folders to cloud storage"

If these folders are important, why aren't you copying them to another drive?
Could the upload to "cloud storage" be what is slowing things down...?
Sometimes life gets in the way. Not everyone is perfect. And no, uploading to the cloud is completely irrelevant in this case.
 
Sometimes life gets in the way. Not everyone is perfect. And no, uploading to the cloud is completely irrelevant in this case.

Really? Why do you say that? I have a 500MB upload and sometimes my Backblaze uploads go awfully slow, other times they fair well zip along.
 
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Really? Why do you say that? I have a 500MB upload and sometimes my Backblaze uploads go awfully slow, other times they fair well zip along.
Because the copying speed and behaviors of the defective drive has already been observed for a week prior to attempting any sort of cloud uploading.
 
A Fishrrman prediction:
The OP has been given good advice in this thread, but doesn't seem interested in pursuing much (or any) of it.

As such, I don't see a resolution to his problems any time soon...
 
This is interesting, but doesn't it make more sense to use one the many SATA connection bays in my Mac Pro? The 8TB external drive that is dying has a USB connection. Also, wouldn't I run into problems attempting to an external drive to an external drive, especiall whn both are now running exclusively on a USB connection?
These hardware duplicators are different beasts. You dock source Hard drive and target Hard drive into ONE docking station/duplicator. It does not even need computer to work. Docking station itself them copies, block by block source to target. Does not matter which format is on the drive, you get exact copy.
Advantage is, that if the problem is failing hardware AND you can still read it, you get exact copy, as long as duplicator manages to read the data. It avoids talking to drives through USB and all software layers.
Of course, it copies format errors. But if you need to fix format errors, which can be destructive, you may want to make exact copy first and work on that.
Not sure if these duplicators are still sold, they were useful few years ago for hard drives. I do not think you can do same for SSDs so their usefulness is dropping. But they save my data few times when drive started to show hardware issues.
 
I've mainly been struck by the extreme contrast between the sky-is-falling-imminent-disaster-help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-!!! thread launch and the seeming lack of urgency plus perfunctory rejections of well-meant counsel.

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ETA: early in the life of this thread, a combative and dismissive tone quickly developed. It looks like either moderators intervened or the posters involved edited their posts.
 
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I've mainly been struck by the extreme contrast between the sky-is-falling-imminent-disaster-help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-!!! thread title and the seeming lack of urgency plus perfunctory rejections of well-meant counsel.

----------
ETA: early in the life of this thread, a combative and dismissive tone quickly developed. It looks like either moderators intervened or the posters involved edited their posts.
I've mainly been struck by the extreme contrast between the sky-is-falling-imminent-disaster-help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-!!! thread title and the seeming lack of urgency plus perfunctory rejections of well-meant counsel.

----------
ETA: early in the life of this thread, a combative and dismissive tone quickly developed. It looks like either moderators intervened or the posters involved edited their posts.
Nice summary. I like it, actually. I'm no stranger to "tech questions" posted online going south immediately, however. This is just another example of all the hostility involved with asking simple questions in an internet environment. The reason for that is the impulse of over 50 percent of readers assuming that you are a "****** listener". I'm not really here to wipe up that mess. Have a good one.
 
That's a good point. As for now, the drive is still uploading folders to cloud storage, although very slowly. I have managed so far to preseve a satisfactory chunk of a much larger chunk.
it slow because of bad block and large file. We just hope all your file not corrupt only .
 
You can get a fairly good diagnostic of the extent of the damage on the drive via this utility which I've found easy to use - DriveDX - https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx

I have about 6 external Hard Drives connected to my iMac, and this utility has been great at doing constant monitoring of all my drives SMART status. Here's an example of a failing drive's SMART status on the tool. If any of those numbers in yellow are high, there's likely significant damage - those numbers will grow over time as you continue to use the drive.

If they are small, likely large amounts of data are still recoverable.

1649907657572.png
 
You can get a fairly good diagnostic of the extent of the damage on the drive via this utility which I've found easy to use - DriveDX - https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx

I have about 6 external Hard Drives connected to my iMac, and this utility has been great at doing constant monitoring of all my drives SMART status. Here's an example of a failing drive's SMART status on the tool. If any of those numbers in yellow are high, there's likely significant damage - those numbers will grow over time as you continue to use the drive.

If they are small, likely large amounts of data are still recoverable.

View attachment 1991246
Interesting. I'll have to give it a shot. Thanks!
 
it slow because of bad block and large file. We just hope all your file not corrupt only .
What's happened is that the drive just keeps chugging along very slowly and randomly disconnects every now and then. And then it reappears and keeps going. It's the extreme slowness that ndicated there was something wrong.

However, that was four days ago, and since then I have picked two solutions...
1) Start uploading everything possible to the cloud.
2) Buy another 8TB drive and make a Time Machine backup of the drives.

What has happened since is the Time Machine backup makes a backup of everything, but ignores the 8TB drive. Efforts to copy individual folders of the 8TB drive to the new drive manually are successful.
 
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What's happened is that the drive just keeps chugging along very slowly and randomly disconnects every now and then. And then it reappears and keeps going. It's the extreme slowness that ndicated there was something wrong.

However, that was four days ago, and since then I have picked two solutions...
1) Start uploading everything possible to the cloud.
2) Buy another 8TB drive and make a Time Machine backup of the drives.

What has happened since is the Time Machine backup makes a backup of everything, but ignores the 8TB drive. Efforts to copy individual folders of the 8TB drive to the new drive manually are successful.
 
OK, I've only skimmed through this thread, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the opensource utility 'ddrescue'. If you manage to locate someone skilled enough to work on your problem odds are that ddrescue is going to be the tool they reach for first - it's purpose built for situations like yours, where the disk is actively in a state of degrading.

What ddrescue does is first try to read everything it can from the failing drive to a new hard drive, getting those parts of the data that are still able to be read without error. Then it goes back and works on the failing sectors of the hard drive, reading them repeatedly and by approaching from both sides of the track to try and find some way to get the missing data. I've used it very successfully on an obviously failing hard drive, and I was able to recover the data from the entire drive; this was back in the days of HFS+, so your mileage under APFS may be somewhat different.

Here is a decent write-up on ddrescue, which might be enough for you to follow along with. You should know up front that you're going to need a drive that is guaranteed to be large enough, since what ddrescue essentially does is try to replicate the source drive onto the target drive, sector by sector. The risk is that simply buying a second 8TB drive might not be enough - not all 8TB drives have EXACTLY the same number of sectors, and you could find yourself three or four sectors short. A better plan would be to buy a 10TB drive, and know that you won't run into that particular problem.


Good luck, and I hope that you recover your data and set up a backup strategy that has more redundancy. If you have a Mac Pro, as I do, I personally recommend the ZFS file system:


Cheers,

Kurt
 
My prayer to the tech gods is that everyone reading this thread has (and maintains) a backup strategy with redundancy.
we think before some era before youtuber , some of our demo would be last long but in the end after 10 years, they delete it. So whatever medium backup for business for long term is still tape . ssd will broke , sata will broke .Cloud is next thing for backup but you need to paid it like amazon s3 ,glacier. Icloud still a cheap backup .
 
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Nice summary. I like it, actually. I'm no stranger to "tech questions" posted online going south immediately, however. This is just another example of all the hostility involved with asking simple questions in an internet environment. The reason for that is the impulse of over 50 percent of readers assuming that you are a "****** listener". I'm not really here to wipe up that mess. Have a good one.
There have been many helpful and supportive responses. Sadly your own reactions seem to be a cause of your feeling of hostility? Hope you get it sorted, and then implement a backup plan!
 
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I desperately need help with an attempt to get all files copied over from a 8Tb dying hard drive. I do not know how long I have. I do know it's important to describe the drive's current status, so I will do so here:

1) Drive was starting to slow down during a copying process, now copying a single 93Gb folder to the functioning drive takes days instead of minutes, and it will more than likely take a total of 3-5 days, with the original estimate at 2-3 weeks.

2) All sources are telling me to stop copying ASAP, and I will.

3) I own SuperDuper, but am hoping there is even better software for a failing hard drive

4) The hard drive icon first showed signs of an issue only a few days ago, when it randomly disappeared from my desktop and then reappeared later. Currently, it has mysteriously reappeared. It is also visible in Disk Utility, but was not visible for the last few days.

5) So far, all advice has been about Linux or PC data recovery software. I'm posting in this forum hoping for some more Mac helpful advice!
On Mac open up /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and run fsck because the link shows you how to do on an external!
 
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