My HDD crashed. I replaced the drive and had to reconstruct the whole system.

I make backups religiously, but one backup is bad.

Apparently, I hadn't shut it down before it was finished doing the backup, and there is a terrible error, that I cannot fix, even though I used alternate superblocks

(yes, I did e2fsck and fsck.ext4)

Does ANYONE have a solution to recover my 2TB backup?

{{PS, I just get my 46 DVD drives of music out to reinstall my music, but I have also lost all my gaming data, and I did keep my pictures/photographs on a Dropbox account, AND all of my passwords are in a paper notebook, so that's good}}

Anyway, thank you for any help.

So your pictures/photographs and passwords are safe/saved. That part is good.
Reinstalling the music is good, although labor intensive and time consuming.

The gaming data, OTOH, may be totally toasted.
You said the drive crashed, but is it still recognized by the system? In other words, might it be possible to run ddrescue or photorec on it and recover something?

I am afraid you did not say what program/process you used to create the backup so I have no clue how to approach recovery of the backup.

I have my personal data (/home) on a raid6 array so failure of a single drive (or even 2 simultaneously) will not cause loss. I still do backups and verify the backup each time though.

Photorec is one which recovers a lot of things, but the caveat I've seen is that it recovers all fragments and makes them some other file name/extension, because it just does the best it can do. The issue there is a fragment of a picture, may have enough to reconstruct what it was, or most of it with maybe a bad section, and if the bad section is in the margins or one spot say in a background, then one can save as an image type and photoshop to clip or copy/paste to fill and blend in so that some spot or edge artifacts do not wreck the photo. Videos recovered are sort of "you get what you get", you get a fragment, or several of them, you can reconstruct, to a limit, or to the limit as to how many fragments you got recovered. Documents, and code, sort of the same thing. Gaming info? Maybe, if the files are ASCII and edit-able, then perhaps you can recover things to a degree. I'm guess/assuming that a lot of that is binary saved data, which is also proprietary for the game. Therefore the only possible thing you may have is to make a copy of any recovered stuff and name it as the saved archive and see if the game recognizes it, then try to re-save in another instance or name, or once the game may say, "Hey, your profile is corrupted ... fixed it", then copy that info elsewhere and see if the next entry into the game doesn't complain. But if there's tons of accomplishment and/or high scores lost, etc, then I do not know what can be done. Sort of you'd need to review how each game saves any progress/accomplishment data and see if you can figure out how to either reconstruct or as described above, figure how to get it to be read, partially if possible. I'm sort of also assuming that accomplishment data for a game is not read-able ascii, otherwise someone could just edit that file and viola become a top level expert all the time.

Note my sigline - all of it.

I have never had that problem recovering files with photorec. These days with large extents file fragmentation is almost unknown in the home market. And I suspect game data are pretty small anyway - just guessing, I don't game.
Scanning 2T will take days - and it will only find things it has profiles for; see the website for a list. You might be lucky. If so scan only for what you really want - it makes the subsequent cleanup faster and easier.

Admittedly, I haven't used Photorec in about 10(?) years, it may work far differently. In fact I've hesitated to recommend it for recovery questions figuring there's got to have been progress and new utilities which exceed it. But invariably when I read those threads, people recommend it.

The other reason why it's been 10+ years is because I subscribe to the mindset of syg00's signature.

kevinbenko,

I have used both photorec and diskdigger successfully.

https://diskdigger.org/

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/wi...th-diskdigger/

https://diskdigger.org/node/1025

https://diskdigger.org/purchase

The free version of DiskDigger only allows the recovery of one file at a time, so the recovery operation takes forever.
The paid version will recover all available files in a single operation and is so much faster.

OK, as I am still anticipating a worst scenario, it will take a while to get to your advice.

THANK YOU!!!

Computersavvy:

Since most {90+%} of my games are on Steam, it has been saved, thankfully

Also... I got a "bug up my {butt}" and decided to do a reinstall, BUT the install kicked an error when I tried to write to the drive... and the drive was causing problems anyway (I guess I know what the problem really was).

So, yes, I still have three more little-used drives on my physical desktop.

Hey... I still have some old serial cables and rs232 cables in a box... I just cannot bear to throw them away.....

No V.35 cables or 8" floppies?Not on this problem drive I hope? Guessing instead that you're saying all your drives are fairly old and this points to the root of the problem.

Packrats Of The World Unite!

I still have a pair of DLT tape drives (in storage)---they hold more than a DVD but are pretty noisy. And there's that Viva 2400 baud external modem... it's just too darned stylish to part with. :^D

OK... calling this "solved"
It is a hell of a grind, though, as the backup included my {username} directory, and I am considering just scrapping it all and re-doing it from scratch.

Anyway...

Thank you all, and have a great day!