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I am using PhotoRec on a damaged hard drive from my sister, who did not do any backups of her family photos... With the default settings, and file formats limited to JPG and a few others, it is working to recover files, which is great. However, the hard drive is responding extremely slowly. Estimation is close to a year for the full drive. I am totally OK with that, whatever it takes. I set up an old garbage PC with FreeDOS to dedicate to it and that is running smoothly. However, I wonder what I will do if there is a power interruption. I want a way to resume rather than start over.

I think that I could occasionally visit this PC and write down the sector being read. Then after any power interruption, I could resume from the latest sector that I wrote down. I believe that the "Offset" in expert mode would be the way to do this. I am wondering:

• Is this correct that using expert mode "offset" to directly enter the latest known block would in fact resume from that point?
• If I don't touch any other settings in expert mode, do they default to non-expert settings, or do I need to do some additional steps/settings to exactly match non-expert mode?

bold0070 wrote: 08 Mar 2022, 20:40 I am using PhotoRec on a damaged hard drive from my sister, who did not do any backups of her family photos... With the default settings, and file formats limited to JPG and a few others, it is working to recover files, which is great. However, the hard drive is responding extremely slowly. Estimation is close to a year for the full drive.

Your drive seems to be dammaged. Use ddrescue as described in the manual to duplicate your drive. That will take time on a dammaged drive but the advantage is that you can run different recovery software on your physically healthy duplicate afterwards as often as you like.
Every access to a dammaged drive is potentially stressing and can degrade the drive further.

I am totally OK with that, whatever it takes. I set up an old garbage PC with FreeDOS to dedicate to it and that is running smoothly. However, I wonder what I will do if there is a power interruption. I want a way to resume rather than start over.

I think that I could occasionally visit this PC and write down the sector being read. Then after any power interruption, I could resume from the latest sector that I wrote down. I believe that the "Offset" in expert mode would be the way to do this. I am wondering:

Photorec keeps track of the current location in the user-readible file named photorec.ses. Upon restart Photorec will ask you to continue a previous recovery based on the content of that file.
What I don't know and don't have time to test for you if is Photorec is continuously updating that information or only if you leave Photorec.

• Is this correct that using expert mode "offset" to directly enter the latest known block would in fact resume from that point?
• If I don't touch any other settings in expert mode, do they default to non-expert settings, or do I need to do some additional steps/settings to exactly match non-expert mode?

See explanation above!

Thank you for the great advice!