I once helped a friend in a similar situation (family photos and documents on a dying disk without backups).
I followed broadly the following procedure: 1. Put the disk in an airtight plastic bag (reason - to avoid humidity getting in during the following steps). 2. Put in the freezer for an hour. 3. Remove from freezer and leave inside the bag for a few minutes (again - to minimise risk of condensation). 4. remove from the bag, make sure no condensation builds up on it, wrap in a kitchen towel (it was Sydney summer, so high temps and humid, though not like Tel-Aviv summer). The idea was to keep any humidity away. 4. Put it on a block of icepack, and another icepack on top of it. 5. Connect it to a comp through an external USB box 6. GNU ddrescue (don't confuse with the non-GNU implementation). It can keep track of where it got to in a previous run so you can pick up from there. 7. Rinse, repeat. It took 2-3 weeks of repeating this process but I managed to save all his data (I think it was half a tera or so) except a tiny part (single-digit kilobytes, I think). The extra twist was that it was a Mac HFS file system and he wanted the data accessible to Windows - Only Linux could be used to support both filesystem formats :) On 22 December 2014 at 16:15, Alon Barzilai <a...@skylinesoft.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > there is tic tac ( http://www.tictac.co.il ) > and recover (http://recover.co.il) > > I used them both in the past. and they both offered good service, but this > service is not cheap. > tic tac ares in this field for longer time, but as I recall their price is > higher than recover. > > Alon. > > > > On 12/21/2014 11:46 PM, Geoff Shang wrote: > > Hi, > > We have a 500 GB external USB drive that's about 5 or so years old (can't > remember exactly when we got it). It's now not spinning up propperly and > we figure its days are numbered. > > Much of what is on it has not been backed up anywhere else (yes, I know). > > Is there somewhere I can take/send it to see if anything can be salvaged? > > Geoff. > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > > -- <http://au.linkedin.com/in/gliderflyer>
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