Recovering linux RAID 1 partitions + files on 1 TB drive requires more than 3.6 TB

[wazoo42]

I have a number of old drives (WDC Black 1 TB sata HDD) that had between 2 and 5 RAID 1 partitions on them (EXT4 or XFS). Each RAID 1 setup had either 2 or 3 drives mirrored and I tried using testdisk on Rocky Linux 10 to save the files. Running the Quick Search works well and lots of recognizable files and folders turn up. When I go to save a partition that is about 600 GB I run out of space on the drive to which I transfer the data. I tried a single 2 TB drive, and when that ran out of space I used 4 of the 1 TB drives in RAID 0 to create a 3.6 TB partition. Once again, trying to copy these files from the 600 GB partition completely filled up the 3.6 TB RAID 0 array after 24-30 hours. How do I go about recovering these partitions and files without resorting to exceedingly large drives?

[recuperation]

Please post your log file.
Quick search is searching for partitions, not for files and folders.
Please explain what you mean when you say "a lot of files and folders turn up".
Did you use TestDisk or PhotoRec?
Try to be specific so that a third person can understand what you did exactly.

Running the Quick Search works well

I don't know what "works well" means.

[wazoo42]

Apologies for not creating a sufficiently detailed initial post and thank you for helping me better understand all of the parts I need.

I am using Testdisk and the log file is attached.

It appears there are some EXT2 part_offset problems in the beginning, and then loads of 2133571369 errors. Are there other errors that tell me more about what is going wrong with the file copy?

My procedure was:
1) Select the drive (/dev/sda) and perform Quick Search (this results in 4 partitions found)
2) I navigated to the 4th partition (which showed lots of files that I wanted to recover)
3) I pressed "a" to select all of the files, then "C" to copy them, and finally navigated to the final location (a 2 TB drive with 800+ GB left for this particular log file) and pressed "c"
4) The copy process proceeded overnight and filled the entire space (this is exactly what happened for the 3.6 TB RAID 0 array too, but it took over a day)

[wazoo42]

Here are some images showing the process.

1) The partitions found on /dev/sda by Quick Search


2) Contents of the 4th partition (files to be recovered)


3) After pressing "a" to select all of the files for recovery

[wazoo42]

4) Directory for saving the recovered files


5) Starting the recovery file copy

[wazoo42]

6) df -h shows 858 GB free on /dev/sdb where the recovered files are copied to


7) Testdisk error once /dev/sdb ran out of space