[ale] Failing external drive. Planning to DD the failing drive to new external drive. Help please

[philip at turmel.org (Phil Turmel)]

On 11/12/2015 01:45 PM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:

> If the drive isn't almost full, using rsync will be faster. dd/ddrescue
> copy empty bits too. rsync only copies actual data. You'll have to make
> any partitions and create the file system prior.

+1 for rsync.  It won't spend time on parts of the drive you don't need,
and you can restart it with --exclude options to skip problems.  Only if
I absolutely had to get one of the problem files would I step down to
ddrescue.