Back up a dead hard drive with rsync

0Jérémy • 5th Dec 2009 • Off-topic • snippet

This is just a quick note for my self : How on on Earth to backup an almost dead hard drive?

In my case, the hard I needed to backup was an USB drive. And I needed to switch it off and re-mount it every 20 seconds.

So determining which file was the last saved during the process was hard. I finally thaugh rsync could help me in this task. Because rsync basically syncs two folders, it knows what it has to copy and (important part) what it has already backed-up!

Finally the command line is pretty simple :

rsync -av /path/to/source/dead/drive/folder /path/to/new/and/safe/backup

Of course I had to repeat the command each time the hard drive needed to be re-mounted, but it does the trick!

Hope it helps!

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