HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi All,

I know this topic has been covered in other posts but it seemed to me that specific details may alter the process/advice given, so I'm going to go ahead and ask away and list as much as I can and hopefully this will garner some helpful information.

I was recently given a Bauhn Dual Hard Drive Docking Station (PN: 36732). I was not made aware that this dual docking station had a cloning function.
So the issue is that I have inadvertently cloned one of my EHDs, losing some very precious data in the process.

The details of my adventures:

I had a 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB sitting in dock A, acting as the main back up of the data from my Mac's HDD.
I also had a Seagate Samsung Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 2TB in dock B, I used this drive to place non-essential files.

I have accidentally cloned the Spinpoint drive to the Barracuda, I think. I write 'think' because some of the data that was cloned from the Spinpoint didn't appear on the Barracuda. Visually the Barracuda is an identical clone of the Spinpoint but some of the data doesn't appear in some of the folders; however, ALL of the folders and MOST of the data appears on the Barracuda.

Someone recommended using recovery software TestDisk but I found the program a little confusing.
I also tried to use Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery, but after 8 hours of scanning only a tiny portion of the partitions I did some digging and reports stated that for drives of this size it could be up to 100 days for scanning purposes. It was also recommended that users make images of the disks and then scan those instead of scanning the whole drive at once. This seems like a lengthy and extremely time consuming task and I'm not even sure this is the best program to try...

Before I decide to fork out some serious money on a professional service, does anyone here think it's worth my time to try to recover the data at home? Keeping in mind I'm a wee bit of a noob. Does anyone have any suggestions of which programs are best to use/easy to use?
A more knowledgable friend wrote me that recovering data from a cloned disk is a little different than simply recovering deleted data and it may be a lot harder to find the data; the subtext was not encouraging.

Any input would be lauded and if I can provide any further details please let me know.

Many thanks!

The rate of success would depende mostly on the way the device does the cloning, and the size of the data in the source hard disk.

You say the Samsung was cloned to the Seagate. How much space was used/free in the Samsung ?

Depending on the size of the data, I believe it will be very hard, or impossible, to recover a meaningful amount of the original data. Considering, that it may have been all overwritten for the device

In this situation there are two good things - now you have backup of Samsung drive and you do not need to prepare money for recovery.

rogfanther wrote:The rate of success would depende mostly on the way the device does the cloning, and the size of the data in the source hard disk.

You say the Samsung was cloned to the Seagate. How much space was used/free in the Samsung ?

Depending on the size of the data, I believe it will be very hard, or impossible, to recover a meaningful amount of the original data. Considering, that it may have been all overwritten for the device

I have added data to the Samsung since this incident. At my best guess there was between 175-350GB of data on the Samsung.

Also, it appears I didn't check the drives too well (the shock at the horror of it all).
Originally I reported that MOST of the data had been cloned but that was incorrect. The drive info reads that only 12.24GB of data are actually present on the Barracuda, though visually it appears identical. Not sure if that info is of any importance.

It may be a little late but... could the cloning process have been interrupted before it finished ? If it had been complete you would have seen the exact same contents. You could open both devices in a hexadecimal editor like WinHex, then use the “Synchronize and compare” function, and scroll down, to see roughly how much data is identical between the two. If it's mostly identical through the end, then it's screwed, sorry, no way to recover data which has been completely overwritten. If only the begining is identical but then it's completely different, you may be able to recover many files from the Seagate Barracuda HDD, but by file carving method, meaning that you can't recover the original directory structure, the files names and timestamps and whatnot, since most of the metadata has probably been overwritten (I don't know the Macintosh file system though, but I guess it's similar to NTFS in that regard, in that most of the metadata structures are generally near the begining of a partition) ; it also means that fragmented files will be nearly impossible to recover completely, even if all their sectors are still there somewhere (some programs claim to be able to recover fragmented files, it's worth trying, I have no idea how efficient that is). TestDisk wouldn't help in a case like this, but its companion program Photorec could find files based on their signatures (you should wisely select which file types are going to be looked for, to avoid false-positives). R-Studio in “Raw files” mode should also find something.
I've tried Stellar Pheonix once and have not been impressed. What it said about a 2TB HDD taking 100 days to be scanned is nonsense, it takes 5 hours at most on a healthy HDD. And making an image first wouldn't make the process any faster (unless it's copied to a SSD or a RAMDisk !...).