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Hey guys

So, I've currently got a friends hard drive in my tower in order to recover all the data from it. The partitions and everything are completely unreadable so I've used a partition finding program to identify the partitions, and then I've mounted the one I need into windows as read only, and now I'm using a data recovery program called Recuva to copy all of the files onto my hard drive one by one. I'll then give the files back to him in some form or another.

But here's the question, the estimated time to complete is 2 whole days from now, and I really want to keep using my computer in the meantime. Do you guys think it's safe to (for example) play games on my computer whilst the process is going on? And does it matter if the game I'm wanting to play is quite CPU intensive and has all its files located on the same hard drive as the one I'm recovering the data to. Also I wanted to work on my music a bit, and most of my software is also on that drive, and that is also very CPU intensive.

Thank you for any advice or opinions you can give, as I really don't want my machine to be tied up by this for 2 whole days.

Gaming won't hurt the recovery directly, but depending on how/why the drive is failing, slowing the recovery down could be mean it dies before you can finish the recovery.

I was worried about that, but will it even slow it down at all? Right now it's using 0% CPU and 1 megabyte per second disk access. unless of course there are some kind of other processes that I can't see, in fact I can't see anything that pertains to the failing disk itself, just the transfer onto my disk.

just use backup

logan86 wrote:...But here's the question, the estimated time to complete is 2 whole days from now, and I really want to keep using my computer in the meantime. Do you guys think it's safe to (for example) play games on my computer whilst the process is going on? And does it matter if the game I'm wanting to play is quite CPU intensive and has all its files located on the same hard drive as the one I'm recovering the data to. Also I wanted to work on my music a bit, and most of my software is also on that drive, and that is also very CPU intensive....

Recuva is pretty good and fairly dependable. But, whether or not your activities slow down or interfere with the low-level recovery process isn't something that can be easily answered. It doesn't take much processing power for Recuva to do its job and it doesn't use a lot of resources. It can be loaded into memory alone from a CD.

But, anything you're running or playing that frequently reads/writes to your hard drive is going to be using the controller, limiting its use for Recova to do its work. It may not matter much, but it may matter in the end.

This is why volunteering to help out a friend means you may actually have to make a sacrifice in order to really do your best. Altruism has a cost, that's why they call it "altruism."

Note: You can't recover from a failed Recuva session. So, for instance, at zero-hour, when Recuva is finishing up its indexing and is about to present you with your hard-won-recovered files and you do something that halts it or crashes the computer or forces a restart/shutdown, you have to start back from scratch.. (At least with versions I used to use.) Keep that in mind.

Morkonan wrote: Note: You can't recover from a failed Recuva session. So, for instance, at zero-hour, when Recuva is finishing up its indexing and is about to present you with your hard-won-recovered files and you do something that halts it or crashes the computer or forces a restart/shutdown, you have to start back from scratch.. (At least with versions I used to use.) Keep that in mind.

Are you sure? I once used Recuva to recover like 500gb of data, a process that took about 14h. But it seems to be an "as you go" process, since I can actually access each file that was recovered during the process, I didn't really have to wait for it to be finished.

Only a 4 year old thread necro

@violet: Please don't resurrect ancient threads.