Power saving settings and data recovery

Aggressive power saving may interfere with data recovery processes. Power saving may interfere with any long-running process, but we are interested in data recovery here. There are three types of issues:

1. Screensavers and display shutoff. Here, it is waking up that may be a problem. Some people use the spacebar to wake the system up. Data recovery software during a scan tends to react by canceling the scan. This is because Cancel is often the default active button, activated by pressing the spacebar.
2. Hard drive idle timers and spindown. Idle timers are rarely an issue because the hard drives involved in a data recovery do not idle. However, it is when you start the scan that the problem might appear. After a long idle, power saving may spin down the drive you intend to recover, and it needs time to spin up. The rotational drive takes several seconds to spin up, which is longer than a typical timeout, and first access to the drive may result in a falsely detected bad block. This only applies to rotational drives. SSDs require no time to transition between idle and active states.
3. System-wide standby or hibernation. Albeit rare, some configurations shut down the entire system, spinning down all drives if there is no user activity. This messes up recoveries because system-wide standby forces all drives to close, and resuming is far from trivial. Such aggressive power-saving policies are to be avoided.

Although all Klennet tools take steps to prevent system-wide shutdowns (as of today), you may still want to review your power-saving settings before starting the recovery.

Created Monday, April 3, 2017

Updated 21 May 2018