Hey guys, thought I'd share with you some finding I'm having while
trying to get a good ddrescue rip of a failing drive so that I can
recover some rare pics for a coworker of mine.
For those unfamiliar with what this is about -- boot to System Rescue
CD, mount the USB target drive (ntfs-3g for drives that are NTFS, so
that you can take really big files), and then type in
ddrescue /dev/(drive) /mnt/path/to/file.dd /mnt/path/to/log.txt
Once this works, I then have the option of "mount -o" ing the image on a
different media as a loopback and scaning it with my other tools, such
as Photorec. Here is a great tutorial with examples:
http://www.manpagez.com/info/ddrescue/ddrescue-1.10/ddrescue_5.php
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step
The average rate thus far is 58,335 B/s.
Converting that to MBps is
58,335 Bps * (1 MBps / 1024 KBps) * (1KBps / 1024 Bps) => .05 MBps
The drive is 160 GBs, so...
160GB * 1024 MBs/GB = 163,840 MB
rate * seconds = MBs recovered
MBs recovered / rate = seconds
163,840 MBs / .05 MBps = 3276800 seconds -> 54613 minutes -> 910 hours
-> 37 days
One cool thing about ddrescue is that the log file allows you to quickly
recover in case of an emergency. Make sure that you put that log file
on a medium that is *not* part of something that will go away with a reboot!
