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Thankyou! I was quite surprised that it worked!
I have finished the job now, and, even though it still took a bit of time, it recovered the majority of the files, so thankyou for your advice!

I have cloned the Poor Health 1TB external drive (although no bad sectors) onto a blank 2TB external drive using DDRescue, and this is the output:

IPOS: 870814MB
OPOS: 870814MB
Non-tried: 428761MB
Rescued: 571377MB
Percent rescued: 57.2%
Non-trimmed: 31180kB
Non-scraped: 0B
Bad-sector: 0B
Bad areas ...

I have started ddrescue, and am cloning the disk onto one of the formatted external drives I have got.
Thankyou for the information about ddrescue!

Ubuntu (which I am using) doesn't recognise the disk when I automatically plug it in via USB, but Disk Utility does, but unfortunately the SMART options are greyed out for some reason.
The files found so far are intact, I have checked them by opening them.
Would it hurt to stop the process with ...

Hi

I am trying to recover some files from a 1TB WD external drive for a friend of mine. Photorec has been going since Saturday, has recovered 161 files, and says its got 5400 hours to go. Is there any way to speed it up? That seems an awful long time.

My friend dropped tea on her laptop, hence there was no data seen on the disk.
She took it to a laptop repair company, who said the disk was burnt out and the data had been lost.
She has some very important stuff on there, so she asked me to have a look, as I have used TestDisk before to recover ...

I have got the files back that I wanted, but they are encoded, and I didn't enocde them. Is there any way I can decode them; they are in western iso format?

I will try that - when I did the Complete Recovery, is that the equivalent of a format?
Won't TestDisk find files that on the disk currently?

My friend had a problem which was getting to the point where I had to reinstall Windows. I had backed up his files before, and then I did a factory reset, which obviously wiped the data. Everything is back in working order now, but for some reason his documents didn't backup. As I have done Samsung ...