Sooner or later, all hard drives fail. Maybe opening files begins to take minutes. Maybe you even hear little skips coming from inside your Mac. Maybe you are beginning to see strange messages about corrupt files. Instead of shrugging off these warning signs, these are the signal to take action. Because unlike human medicine, in computer medicine we can take an exact snapshot of the hard drive at the current point in time, preserve a copy of the data, and recover it later whenever necessary.
Hard drive problems only get worse, not better, so the sooner that you take this snapshot (also called a disk image, or just "image") of your hard drive, the better your chances of preserving all of your files. Disk Drill makes this process quick and painless. Uniquely, Disk Drill also includes all data that is on the disk, even parts with scrambled data. You can then run data recovery through Disk Drill and restore files that you can’t see on your hard drive.
How to...
“You throw away an old folder without checking its contents, or prematurely decide you won't be needing a certain file anymore. That's why you should consider using an application like Disk Drill; to protect you against yourself and the fancies of technology.”
Simon Slanger
Runs on any PPC
or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5+ |
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How to Back Up a Failing Disk to a DMG image
#1
Disk Drill already installed
To make a DMG snapshot with all of the contents of your hard drive, start Disk Drill. In the "Recover data" section, click on the hard drive that is showing signs of trouble. After selecting the appropriate hard drive, click the "Backup into DMG-image" button at the bottom of the window. A "Save" dialog box then appears.
In the Save As: line, by default you will see the name of your hard drive. In the Where: line, by default you will see the name of your user folder on your computer. You may have noticed, though, that saving a copy of a failing hard drive on that same failing hard drive is a bad idea. The hard drive is physically coming apart, so it is much smarter to save a copy of your hard drive on a second, unrelated hard drive. That way, the failure of your first hard drive won't affect the contents of your second hard drive (which will include the snapshot that you're making).
#2
You might need more storage
So connect a sufficiently large external hard drive to your computer (CDs, DVDs and flash drives are generally not large enough to hold all of the information stored on today's hard drives). In Disk Drill, click on the black triangle in the Save As: line. You will now see lists of folders and disks. On the left side of the dialog box, click on the name of the external hard drive that you just connected. Click the Save button. If Disk Drill warns that the external hard drive does not have enough space, either free up space on the external drive by deleting files, or find another hard drive with more space. If there is sufficient space, Disk Drill begins to make an exact copy of your hard drive on the external drive. This process is time-consuming, so sit back and relax while Disk Drill does the heavy lifting.
#3
Disk image as a backup
Once the copying process is complete, on your external drive you should have a large DMG file that has the name of your main hard drive. This DMG file is an exact copy of the data on your hard drive. Everything is included in this file, even live files and “empty” sectors that need data recovery in order to be read.
#4
Recover data from your failing disk
Now you can recover files from either the failing hard drive or from the copy you just made. It’s faster and more reliable to recover data from the DMG file, however. To access the copy of your disk that is inside that file, you need to mount the disk first: the DMG file is treated by the computer as if it is a “real,” physical disk (in this case, a disk that happens to have a copy of everything on your failing hard drive). And to do this, you don’t need the original, failing hard drive at all! To mount the disk, either double-click the DMG file icon in the Finder, or use the “Attach non-mountable disk image” option in Disk Drill to select the DMG file. Then you can look at the intact files stored on the disk or start data recovery of missing files in Disk Drill.
You can now relax knowing that even if your failing hard drive stops working completely, you still have an exact copy from before that will assist in recovering your files and information.