I don't know which one is better, but I would go for a bitwise clone of the hard-drive using either dd
, ddrescue
or clonezilla
. These utilities ignore the file-system and just copy the sectors. Clonezilla in particular is space efficient: by default it copies only used sectors and compresses the backup image (see Save 1st disk (sda) as an image on 2nd disk (sdb) tutorial).
The other solution would be to use a file-system-level utility like rsync
or grsync
. This could work reasonably well, too, especially if the drive hasn't yet developed bad or corrupted sectors. (If it has, however, see ddrescue
.)
Whatever you do, though, stop using the dying drive now. Well, that is, if you put any value on your data.
See also: