My HDD is failing and manually copying files to an external HDD is taking forever. We’re talking about KB/s transfer speeds. I have around 1.3TB in it, but only really need around 400-500gb. I’m afraid this method is only hastening its death.
I used to use a dos program, Norton Ghost, to clone partitions. Would a similar program be better for backing up my files vs copy/pasting? I feel like the manual copying is wearing the drive out faster. On the other hand, cloning might just copy over corrupted files on bad sectors and all (I know nothing about this so I could be wrong).
Thanks in advance.
A block-by-block copy would likely be faster, however it could also not work at all, depending on the type of damage. Keep in mind that if it works, you will have the damaged files on the new disk as well, where you can try to repair them. May I kindly suggest Clonezilla?
And this, friends, is your regular reminder to have a backup system in place before the problems start.