[Bug-ddrescue] Requesting assistance with data recovery

[Brendan Tildesley]

Hello, I was advised by Freenode IRC user jemark from #gnu to contact 
this address for assistance with my data recovery problem.

I have two 2TB hard drives containing years upon years of data that I 
keep synchronised with rsync; however, I accidently erased one, and 
while copying the data back with rsync, I got a bunch of I/O errors.

If somone is able to help, It would probably be best to talk in IRC so I 
can answer questions and follow instructions.
My username is Brendan_T and my timezone is +10 (Australia).
I will check my email again in 7 hours.

Thanks for any assistance.


Below is a basic outline of what went wrong, and my terrible attempts to 
fix it:

Stupidly, I ran fsck for a few minutes until I noticed this on the 
ddrescue website:
IMPORTANT! Never try to repair a file system on a drive with I/O errors; 
you will probably lose even more data.

fsck output:
fsck.ext4: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
while trying to open /dev/sdc1

...
Force rewrite? yes
Error reading block 252707726 (Attempt to read block from filesystem 
resulted in short read) while getting next inode from scan.  Ignore 
error? yes
Force rewrite? yes
Error reading block 252707727 (Attempt to read block from filesystem 
resulted in short read) while getting next inode from scan.  Ignore 
error? yes
Force rewrite? yes
...
(I went through about 20 of these)

At this point I killed the fsck, and moved to running `ddrescue -n 
/dev/sda devsda devsda.log' on a new 2TB drive.
After 3 days and several restarts of ddrescue due to it randomly cutting 
out, ddrescue finished, telling me the drive was full, since they are 
the same size.
(for the last 500GB or so I forgot to keep the -n option)
ddrescue log: http://dpaste.com/646674/
by the time it had finished, about 650MB was said to have failed to copy.
I had only filled the corrupted drive to about  1.5TB, so hopefully 
nothing Important was at the last bit of the disk.

After this I realised it would be a much better idea to stop and ask 
somebody who actually knows what their doing.