On 12 May 2011 14:57, guerrier <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Matt Oates (Home) <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Is parallel a great idea here? > > That's my real question. I have a failing hdd, from which i would > like to move as much data as possible as fast possible.
If it was me I'd chuck in a blank USB disk and use the 'dd' command to just verbatim copy the partition/disk over, this is about as quick as you are going to get. You can either do that to an image file on the USB disk (with/without compression) or possibly more preferably write the partition straight to the USB device and have the filesystem put straight on to there. If it's a remote host it might be worth just doing scp -C since it will ignore any indexing of files and stuff that rsync does (not sure if rsync does this if the remote destination is empty anyway?). Parallel is likely to make a sick disk sicker at this point as the different parallel file reads will cause the heads to move all over the place! dd reads sequential blocks from the disk (ignoring the filesystem) so it's fast and limits the work on the hard disk. http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd Best of luck! Matt.
