Disk backup app with persistant "retry" feature.

I have a harddrive that is going, and want to make a backup before it completely bites it.

Problem is, disk imaging apps like Macrium Reflect tend to fail because the harddive will intermittendly stop working for a while then start working again after a while. This makes most backup apps fail... unless I enable ignore on error, but then I will have holes of missing data everywhere in the backup image.

It there any (preferably freeware for windows) disk imaging app that can persistantly retry on error until it gets the entire image? This should work as the drive keeps continuing to work after a while of being unresponsive. I don't care if this will drastically make the drive fail faster, I just want to create a backup from it so I can image it to a new drive before its 100% unreadable. I am going to trash this thing once I get a backup off of it anyway.

I don't know of any imaging program that would do what you want.

If it were my drive that's on the verge of failure as yours is I would immediately make manual backups of all my important data like docs, pics, emails, bookmarks and anything else that could be put on a separate drive for storage and used/moved to a new hard drive. I would not rely on an imaging program to move the drive image (clone it) to a new drive because of the problem, that you mention, of possible errors on the cloned drives image.

I would start from scratch with a clean install. A bit more work unfortunately but much safer and ultimately less headaches than dealing with program/OS errors due to missing/corrupt files/data.

You could try using Windows easy transfer to retain all your old settings and some data from the old drive to save some time on the new install but I'd still make manual backups of all important data in case of imminent catastrophic failure of the drive.

Yeah, I already made manual backups of the important data, that's why I was going for an attempt at an image now.