Raspberry Pi as disk cloner?

[flurbyrock]

Hey folks,

My sister recently experienced a disk failure on a 2TB external drive. I discovered TestDisk and PhotoRec and have had some success. Very grateful for the apps.

My question... on first attempt to fully create the disk image of the drive, the process ran to 280 hours when (accidentally) the power to my laptop failed and it eventually went to sleep, stopping the process at 46%. I have successfully recovered over 300,000 files from that much of the image.

I would like to set up a more reliable disk cloning process, a dedicated Raspberry Pi, running test disk, with both disks attached. I believe I could leave this running for weeks uninterrupted.

My question – is TestDisk computationally demanding. i.e. is there any point in running the imaging process on something as low power as a Raspi? Might that process then take years instead of weeks if the cpu time required goes up?

Anyone with experience of same, your comments would be greatly appreciated.

John.

[recuperation]

Hey folks,

My sister recently experienced a disk failure on a 2TB external drive. I discovered TestDisk and PhotoRec and have had some success. Very grateful for the apps.

My question... on first attempt to fully create the disk image of the drive, the process ran to 280 hours

That appears to slow to me. That translates into 2 MB/sec whereas I accept something approach the native speed for continuous reading which is more in the order of 100 MB/sec

when (accidentally) the power to my laptop failed and it eventually went to sleep, stopping the process at 46%. I have successfully recovered over 300,000 files from that much of the image.

I would like to set up a more reliable disk cloning process, a dedicated Raspberry Pi, running test disk, with both disks attached. I believe I could leave this running for weeks uninterrupted.

The laptop is perfectly OK when it has USB3.0 connectors. You might want to create a energy saving profile that prevents automatic shutdown. Sometimes it is already there and called "presentation mode".

My question – is TestDisk computationally demanding.

Testdisk does not need computation power. Photorec is a different story.

i.e. is there any point in running the imaging process on something as low power as a Raspi? Might that process then take years instead of weeks if the cpu time required goes up?

I don't own a Raspby. I read that older versions came with USB2. I don't know if the current one is able to drive the USB3-ports at adequate speed. You could test that by zeroing a drive using dd p.e.

[flurbyrock]

Thanks for the extra info - very helpful. You're right, older ones are USB2.0 so I'll hold off for the holiday season when the laptop is no longer needed and I can change the energy preferences.