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I have a failing drive which reads at 24 kbit/s.  As it its total capacity is 3.4 TB, it will take probably 3 years to recover the data.  Is there any way if performing a backup of the MFT (table of contents), then every potential sector which reads at a better rate as an image file so I could mount in the meantime even if it will be incomplete in order to recover some "critical" files ASAP?

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    ddrescue has a command where you can skip sectors. You could try skipping forward to see if later blocks have a faster speed.
    – Lawrence
    Nov 12, 2019 at 8:22
  • You can set it to spend less time retrying things it can't read.. or retry it less times.
    – barlop
    Feb 27, 2021 at 19:55

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ddrescue has some options that can speed up at least the first pas, but this is done manually on a trial and error basis.

The option -a, --min-read-rate=<bytes> specifies the minimum read rate of good areas in bytes/s. Specifying a size like 10M may skip first areas that are still readable but extremely slowly, continuing with areas that can still be read quick enough.

You could also run in --reverse mode to read the disk back-to-front, or force it to start at a specific offset with --input-position=X to skip into a faster region.

The options of --no-scrape or --no-trim might be able to speed up the recovery of the easy parts by entirely omitting trying the damaged sectors. You could also try values for the --skip-size option to see if larger or smaller values than the default will speed things up.

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