Data recovery taking a long time

[tparsons]

Hi, I'm running R-Studio for Linux on Ubuntu. I'm trying to recover data off a hard drive that is formatted with EXT4. I have the bad hard drive connected via a USB enclosure. The process is taking quite awhile. It's been running for over 22 hours, and it says the remaining time is 1y 2m. Should I stop the process and restart it? Or should I just let it run?

[Alt]

Connections through USB are relatively slow, but 1y2m is abnormal even for them. Looks like you hard drive has some hardware problems that make it work so slowly. I don't know if there are some bad sectors on it, and the data recovery will start much faster when they end, or the problem affects the entire hard drive and there will be no increase in data recovery speed. Everything is depends on the condition of the hard drive.

[tparsons]

Thanks. I'm afraid I do have some bad sectors on it. I believe I should have made an image file of it using dd before. However, at this point, I'll probably just let it run.

[mrsolver48]

I am a rookie at this, running my first recovery as I type. I see I'm not the first one to start wondering how long this is recovery is going to take. I noticed that the estimated time remaining kept changing, from a few minutes to several hours, and I was confused.

I discovered what I think is the best way to estimate the time remaining: Look at the amount of data in the target directory and divide by the time elapsed recovering the files to determine the recovery rate. Your estimate of the time remaining is the amount of data remaining divided by the calculated recovery rate.

My system is recovering files at the rate of 2 GB per hour, and I have about 60 GB to go after running recovery for about 17 hours. That means it's going to take me a shade over 2 days to recover ~100 GB of data. Next up: a 150 GB partition. FUN!