Hey folks, I wanted to share this tool I recently came across, called Rescuezilla - not seen it mentioned a lot here on Lemmy. It’s a neat little tool worth keeping on an usb-stick.
What is Rescuezilla?
Rescuezilla is a backup/recovery solution. It’s a Clonezilla GUI that’s fast, feature-packed and very easy-to-use, even for everyday computer users.
Main features:
- Disk Imaging: Easily create full images of your hard drives or partitions for backup or migration.
- Restoration: Quickly restore disk images to the original drive or a different one, making recovery a breeze.
- Cross-Platform Support: Works with various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Live Environment: Runs from a live USB or CD, so you can back up or restore your system without booting into your installed OS.
- File System Support: Compatible with multiple file systems, making it versatile for different storage devices.
The full feature list: https://rescuezilla.com/features
Maybe… I have a couple of hard drives to rescue and I need to figure out how to approach it
You should take it to a data recovery specialist if the data is really really important but for lightly-damaged sectors, you want ddrescue (oldie but goodie) or HDDSuperClone (no longer developed) or OpenSuperClone (fork of HDDSuperClone, more actively developed).
You can combine some of these tools with commercial programs like dmde, UFS Explorer, or R-Studio - to target specific files for a quick result - but basically it’s best to get a full disk image off the bad drive onto another drive/image.
I used ddrescue for a failing drive of not critical stuff, and had great success. Lots of guides online. If I were doing it again though, I would NOT image the whole drive – just the partition of interest. That greatly simplifies running fsck on the image and mounting it to recover the files.