File copying utility like rsync with error handling like ddrescue, for data recovery from a hard drive with bad sectors or hardware failure [closed]

I have a 3TB Hitachi that reads painfully slow, ddrescue will operate at the file level. But not on directories. However I could not get ddrescue's --timeout or --min-read-rate options to work.

You would want to do this in a script to ddrescue one file at a time.

cat listoffiles | while read file
pipe while> do
pipe while> ls -l "$file"
pipe while> ddrescue -n -e1  "$file" /cc/RecoveredFiles/"$file" /cc/RecoveredFiles/"$file".llog
pipe while> date
done | tee -a  /cc/RecoveredFiles/ddrescue.log

Maybe rsync has changed in the years since this question was asked.

My experience was that rsync currently does a great job copying stuff off a dying hard drive, with

rsync -a <src> <dest>

It would quickly move on if it encountered errors, and when rerun would go back to try those files again.

rsync --version reports rsync version 2.6.9 protocol version 29

Regarding the other answers:

The 2011 answers seem to be promoting tools that are just commercial equivalents to ddrescue - no indication that they are file-aware. Fishy. The 2013 answer is interesting.

Great question, love the level of detail. For a utility that would work well in this scenario I would recommend trying Filescavenger from Quetek. It will allow for excessive re-reads in the 100+ count but more importantly it has a disk imaging feature that will allow you to dump the entire contents to an image without wasting time trying to assess the files then load the image and scan through it for files. The utility runs $50 for a home users but you can download it and test it to the point of seeing what can be recovered from the image before spending money.

If it's professional use it'll cost you a pretty penny but gains significant features including support for logical and hardware raid arrays.

If this fails as well, you may be past the point of software recovery tools. If you are and you can justify the cost of in lab recovery let me know what country, state and city you're in. I can recommend one of our or or competitors labs near you.

Chris

You want Progressive Copier. It's targeted at doing whole drives, but since it takes a file path as a parameter, it should work for individual files as well. I don't think it'll work for directories -- you'd have to specify each file.