[vox] Recovering data

[Mark's tech help]

 Sorry for answering my own post, but a couple things occured to me since then.
 A paramount consideration-- one which I neglected to mention-- is that you need plenty free space on a working drive on which to recover the files when you fire up PhotoRec.  Also note that it's a text-based UI, not a GUI as I'd typed..  and a feature you'll want to use is the ability to untick types of files (file extensions) which you can afford to not recover, thus saving much time and space (i.e. *.mp4, *.mov, *.ogv etc would be some large ones).
 And my biggest oversight was to fail to suggest the following:
 Since it's giving IO Errors, it's not advisable to run PhotoRec directly on that attatched drive.  Since every spin-up and every read attempt could well be doing more data destruction on such a drive, you want to go with a special tool that's designed to pull from damaged hd's -- a `dd` alternative 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue 
 (From which: "ddrescue uses a sophisticated algorithm to copy data from failing drives causing them as little additional damage as possible.")
 Then you'll have a big file like  mydyingHDimage.dd   on which you can then run PhotoRec --  note that you'll need free space of 1TB for that, then additionally close to another 1TB (depending on which filetypes you decide to forego) for pulling out data with PhotoRec.
 The other thought is, make sure your filesystem drivers are updated, i.e.
 https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/e2fsprogs
   and its dependencies, of course.
   
   Laissez les bons temps rouler!


On 2/15/2015 at 10:23 AM, "Mark's tech help" <markindavis at hush.com> wrote:
>
>I have some experience with this kind of thing.  You might want 
>make sure about your assumption re the USB (enclosure I presume).  
>Even the cable itself could be the problem.  
>Once you can get at it, yes PhotoRec is good for recovering files 
>(but wow, all those files without filenames can be a headache.)


  
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