Three hours on a 20 minute save file transfer, still not sure how it happened

Was moving my Skyrim saves from an old external drive to a new one last Friday. The drive was dying, clicking every few seconds. 900 hours across 12 characters. Got maybe 40 saves moved before it just stopped reading. Tried every recovery tool I had, from Recuva to some sketchy Russian software I found on a forum. Finally got the files off using a live Linux USB and ddrescue, one block at a time. The whole thing ate my entire evening. Has anyone else had a drive fail mid-backup and just sat there watching the progress bar crawl at 2 MB per minute?

1 comments

1 Comment

elliot_king1mo ago

Honestly, that sucks but sometimes you gotta just let the drive die and save what you can. Tbh I’ve been burned by backups before too, so I always keep three copies now and test them before I trust them.