I have tried GNU ddrescue but the drive fails all to often. The block
device disappears and I have not worked out a sure fire way of
bringing it back online other then a reboot. Power cycling the device
(attached via USB) or restarting udev doesn't assist either.
Eventually the device becomes available, but there is a lot of
twiddling of thumbs.
The photos where the main priority, and I manage to source them by
mounting the device read only and using rsync to restart the copy once
the drive comes back online.
I managed to get a lot less error rates by copying smaller files, so I
skipped *.MOV and *.AVI patterns with --exclude.
If I could tell the linux or the USB system not to offline an erroring
device I believe that would help.
The above blog post provided me with an idea to issue hdparm options
which may assist a failing drive.
If its failing on USB have you tried plugging it in direct?
It could just be a crud usb > sata/whatever chip.
ddrescue will save a log file you can use to restart.
also the freezer/fridge trick works surprisingly well.
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