Advise: Clone disk or files copy

[coucou]

Hello,

For some time at each startup of Windows, a sequence of CHKDSK starts to correct my HDD  errors (1 TB of data). I have to change it and of course recover my datas.
I wonder if I do a Clone disk with Acronis True Image (very fast) or copy files (several hours).
I'm afraid that by doing the Clone disk, I will "copy" the bad sectors (errors disks) too

TNX for yr advices

[eurobyn]

You better make a backup as soon as possible

first with acronis

 

then you can copy files to another disk 

 

make sure the harddisk is not hot when you make the backups

 

and replace that harddisk

 

 

 

[coucou]

I'm sorry eurobyn, forget Backup, I wanted to say Clone disk

[mp68terr]

If you are worry about 'cloning the bad sectors', what about simply copying the files with apps like fastcopy (copy and check) to a new drive? You will know about those having troubles.

[coucou]

Simply copying the files even with Terracopy or Fastcopy it will take hours (1TB).

I'm not sure by cloning the disk, will my new disk have bad sectors or these sectors will be skip.

[spudboy]

If you're worried about bad sectors being copied, then what other choice do you have other than waiting the hours for a file copy? Just start it before you go to bed, 8 hrs later you'll wake up and it will have finished.

[masterupc]

I'll use terabyte image for windows (search it here), it's a better solution tha acronis.

Disk imaging is not going to 'copy' the bad sectors, only the data in a compressed format and you can save it in other disk (external, ie). You can use vivard (google it) to do a surface scan and recover the data stored in damaged areas. It's the best policy regarding your data.

[C.G.B. Spender]

You can not copy bad sectors, bad sector is a physical damage to the surface of the spinning disk inside your harddrive, regardless of if you copy data manually or do disk clone, once the heads hit the bad sector it will slow down to a crawl while the harddrive will make sounds that will make you question whether it's allright for it to do such sounds. The resulting file that had its data on the bad sector will just be corrupted, but the sectors on the new disk where it will reside can not get damaged in such way.

 

With that said, from my experience it's better to start copying the data manually and here's why: I was once in the situation as you, decided on a disk clone, the harddrive literally died in the middle of it, leaving me with dead harddrive and unusable incomplete disk clone. If I had started to copy the data manually, I'd at least have the half of data.

 

The real lesson to take from this is if you have data you don't wanna lose, keep a backup or use a raid setup with spare drives (I use zfs in freenas on 8x 4tb drives in RaidZ2 + regular backups of the portions of the data that are critical. But backup is best, raid with spare drives can still fail. If 2 drives fail and then 3rd fails during resilvering I can say goodbye to 20TB of movies.

 

Lastly, I wasn't kidding when I said it will slow down to a crawl, I once seen 4tb drive take almost 3 days to copy over due to bad sectors.

[DKT27]

I don't know about how other softwares do it, but this software has an option which copy only sectors in use. Now how to prevent bad sectors from being copied. First run the chkdsk utility, let it fix it. Then you can clone using it.