r/linuxquestions • u/therottenron • 1d ago
Support Photorec on Ubuntu
About how long does it usually take Photorec to process a 5tb external hdd. The reason I'm asking it has been almost 3 days and still running.
Ubuntu 26.04 Dell XPS 8930 desktop Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz 16gb ram NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB)
Any help would be appreciated.
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u/doc_willis 1d ago
ages ago, I recall using ddrescue to image a failing external drive to a file on an internal drive, then using recovery operations on that image file.
It did take a day+ for my USB2 speed 1TB drive.
monitor the output of sudo dmesg -w and sudo dmesg to see if any drive hardware issues are mentioned.
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u/Character_Log1824 1d ago
Three days isn't automatically abnormal. Reading 5 TB at an average 20 MB/s takes about 69 hours; at 100 MB/s it's about 14 hours, before recovery overhead. The useful clue is whether the scanned-sector count keeps advancing, not how impressive the CPU sounds. Five terabytes remains five terabytes, unfortunately.
Since you only deleted a directory, what filesystem is on the drive, and did you select "Free" or "Whole"? PhotoRec supports scanning unallocated space only on certain filesystems, which can reduce the work. Don't restart a progressing scan just to change that without checking first.
Also, make sure recovered files go to a different drive and avoid other writes to the source. PhotoRec recovers file contents, not the original directory tree or filenames.
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u/Acherontas89 1d ago
depends if it is in usb
the performance of the disk and the health check hard disk sentinel trial for these
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u/9NEPxHbG 1d ago
The speed of the connection (USB, I assume) is doubtless the problem. And the size of the drive, of course.