DDrescue-GUI taking over 7 days and not finished, is this normal?

Hi,

Sounds like a strange one. Can you see drive activity? My guess is that either the program crashed for some strange reason, or your drive has a very small amount of unreadable data, and ddrescue is being very persistent. This sounds like a crash to me if the elapsed time isn't still counting.

What operating system and what version are you using? If you open the terminal output box, do you see anything, like errors from ddrescue?

It should be safe to stop as long as you used a logfile. Then, if need be, you can start again without any worries.

Hope this helps,
Hamish

Hi Hamish,
You were right. The drive had very small amount of unreadable data and the tool kept trying. I decided to Abort the process and restart my iMac. Once restarted I was able to see both drives, the source and target exactly the same. This tool is amazing. No data was lost.
Thank you!
Ed V.

Good to hear, and I'm glad it worked for you :).

Hamish

Hi Hamish,
I have another question:
After copying the data from the source drive onto the external USB drive, do the files get locked on the target drive?
I'm not able to delete some of the folders in the target drive that I don't need. Please explain.
Thank you,
Ed V.

Hi,

The files on your target drive should be writable - or at least have the same permissions as the ones on the source drive. If you can't delete them, it's probably because you don't have permission on the source either. Can you confirm that? Are you trying to delete system files? If you got all your data off the target drive, I recommend you wipe it and then reformat it so you can use it as normal, unless macOS is residing on it now.

Having said that, you normally shouldn't write or change any data to/on the target drive - if you need to recover more data from the source, you'll have to start from scratch if so. What you'll normally want to do is recover to a temporary target drive, and then copy anything you want somewhere else - the original data may have corrupted and need more work.

Not everyone has a third large drive to recover to, so I guess it's not always possible, though. In your case, you said it was only a very small area that couldn't be read, so you are probably fine :).

Hope this helps,
Hamish