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Roughly how fast is file copying?

Posted: 02 Jun 2013, 16:03
by iiiyraegr
Thank you Christophe for the life-saving program testdisk!

I have one question: Roughly how fast does testdisk copy files?

I realize that depends on a host of factors like hard drive speed, hard drive health, file size, cluster size etc, but let's assume the source and target are both perfectly healthy Seagate Barracudas with NTFS partitions.

The reason I ask is that 14 hours ago I started a copy of about 800GB of data spread over about 500,000 files and I have no clue what progress has been made (I just see "Copying, please wait"). I'm reluctant to stop the copying and take a look, because it doesn't appear that there would be any way for me to resume copying where it left off, and this data recovery is time-sensitive. I can hear both hard drives working, so I don't think anything has hung.

I have already made a sector-based clone of the 3TB source drive using ddrescue (I got it and testdisk from the Ubuntu Rescue Remix Live CD), and that only took five hours with no physical errors reported, though obviously I can't expect sector-based cloning speeds from file copying.

Re: Roughly how fast is file copying?

Posted: 04 Jun 2013, 18:48
by iiiyraegr
The answer, in my particular case, was about 500MB per minute, meaning it took over 26 hours to copy my 800GB.

The exact same hardware configuration copies sectors at an average 150MB per second using ddrescue. My file copying was no doubt slowed down by a large chunk of my data being spread out over hundreds of thousands of small files.

But 26 hours is a long time to go with no feedback! (I actually lost patience at 24 hours and restarted when I saw that it had been copying the whole time and hadn't hung.) If it's a simple matter to do so, I would like to suggest that a progress report indicating the number of files copied out of the total number of files selected for copy would be greatly appreciated by other users.

But I can't complain--testdisk recovered files that no other program I tried could!