How to restore uncorrupted files from backup?

Ryulin · 07 Aug 2016

Hi all,

Hoping for a bit of advice regarding using backups to restore data.
I have recently had a partial HDD failure on my data drive, it is not fully backed up but my essentials are.
I am currently xcopying the contents to a replacement HDD (which seems like it is going to take several hours as every times it hits a bad file it sits around for a few minutes deciding what to do...).

Looking at the output I would estimate 2 - 5% of the files are failing CRC, other files seems to be copying across so far but of these some are also corrupted (somehow without CRC errors

) - such as noticeably corrupt .jpgs that have grey/random colours for the bottom part of the image).
Basically to summarise I'm not exactly sure how bad the damage is.

When the copy is completed I want to restore from backup anything I can but I am not sure how to determine what to copy over.

I have the following situations:

Non-backed up files - These are non-essentials e.g. games saves, nice to have but not the end of the world.
If they are corrupt I should probably remove them (is there a way to tell / do this)?
Otherwise keep them.

Thanks,
Ryulin

Backed up files - Photos and other docs.
My backup is recent enough but there will have been some changes since.
I would dump the whole backup out but I want to keep any files that are more recent than the backup but not corrupted - how can I tell?

dalchina · 07 Aug 2016

Hi, for scanning for corrupt image files you could try
Image Sequence Scanner download | SourceForge.net

I came across one called Bad Peggy but this seems an obsolete rather odd java based program which wouldn't run.

Not many such- you may be lucky and find another.

The lesson here is to start using disk imaging - e.g. Macrium reflect (free) + its boot medium + external storage
Such images are not just a full backup which you can maintain incrementally, but also for Windows allows you to restore Windows exactly as was even after a disk failure.