Best way to backup a dying drive?

[FlpDaMattress]

Hello lads, Probably an unusual question with no right answer. Earlier today I replaced the HDD in a friends 2012 Mac book, His last time machine backup was 2018. I was kinda curious how it would look in CrystalDiskInfo so i threw it in my drive toaster and it spun up just fine. Since there is a chance i can backup data from it, What's the best way to do so? Windows File explorer would corrupt everything if the drive dies mid transfer, Is there a better/ more reliable alternative for copying whatever i can over?

[Constantin]

If a drive is red in CrystalDiskInfo, it doesn't mean it will die tomorrow....

It can die in a day as it can die in years......

just copy it, it will just read...

not many options...

[FlpDaMattress]

2 minutes ago, Constantin said:

If a drive is red in CrystalDiskInfo, it doesn't mean it will die tomorrow....

It can die in a day as it can die in years......

Drive was dead and clicking when i pulled it. file explorer sprung open..

[Constantin]

1 minute ago, FlpDaMattress said:

Drive was dead and clicking when i pulled it. file explorer sprung open..

Ohh ok, but as i said.

Whatever you do, it will read from the drive......

[Pickles von Brine]

Your drive was clicking when you pulled it? That isn't good. Continuing to attempt to pull data from the drive will risk further damage to the drive. 

If the data is important enough to you, I recommend sending it to a data recovery company. The ones I recommend (former data recovery engineer):
No particular order:
We Recover Data

Drive Savers
Salvage Data

If the data isn't as important and you are willing to risk a catastrophic failure, you could try Unstoppable Copier by roadkil. With the drive in its current shape, I HIGHLY doubt it will work. 

[FlpDaMattress]

yeah the data is important but not worth spending a few hundred bucks on. mostly memes and stuff if I'm being honest

I decided to just send it and copy the drive with Minitool Partition Wizard to an external HDD. already got a 1tb WD blue in the mail. easy money.

 

 

 

shoutout to r/LinusFaces

[Kilrah]

ddrescue, it will copy the drive without insisting on bad sectors to avoid losing time/damaging further, then once it's done a first pass on the full drive it goes back to those bad sectors and tries a bit longer, etc over multiple passes.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

3 hours ago, FlpDaMattress said:

yeah the data is important but not worth spending a few hundred bucks on. mostly memes and stuff if I'm being honest

I decided to just send it and copy the drive with Minitool Partition Wizard to an external HDD. already got a 1tb WD blue in the mail. easy money...

If only it would cost just a few hudred bucks. It would be more likely to cost well north of $1k.

 

While this is too late to help your friend with his data, you might try convincing him to start making and maintaining backups. While, ideally, data needs to exist in three separate places to be reasonably safe, such as on the computer, on an onsite external drive, and on an offsite external drive (and the external drives kept disconnected from the computer, powered down, and stored out of sight of the computer except while updating one of the backups), even one backup is considerably better than none.

 

People, you all need to pay attention to Lord Xeb. He used to work as a drive recovery expert and has forgotten more about drives and drive recovery than most of us will ever know. 

[Pickles von Brine]

1 hour ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

If only it would cost just a few hudred bucks. It would be more likely to cost well north of $1k.

 

While this is too late to help your friend with his data, you might try convincing him to start making and maintaining backups. While, ideally, data needs to exist in three separate places to be reasonably safe, such as on the computer, on an onsite external drive, and on an offsite external drive (and the external drives kept disconnected from the computer, powered down, and stored out of sight of the computer except while updating one of the backups), even one backup is considerably better than none.

 

People, you all need to pay attention to Lord Xeb. He used to work as a drive recovery expert and has forgotten more about drives and drive recovery than most of us will ever know. 

Thanks Fitz. Yeah, based on what the OP is saying. The drive is likely hitting a badly degraded area of the drive and completely destabilizing the drive, resulting in the drive clicking. Likely the result of a weak head possibly. Either that, or there is something far worse going on. 

 

As a guess, the cost of recovery on this is going to be the following

Low end ~$950
Average - ~$1150
High - ~$1490

Hopefully it is just a degraded surface or a weak head. I could work with a weak head. Read as much as you can, then go over the weaker areas. Keep going till the head fails, swap, and pray.