External Drive Pain. FTP to the rescue.

My USB 250Gb external drive is about ready to pack it in. When I plug it into a USB port, I get the popup asking what I want do (browse, transfer files etc...). Then after not long using it, the drive "disconnects" from the system, and very quickly reconnects again, and I get the popup asking what I want to do as if I had just plugged it on. Now this is happening ever more frequently (sometimes every 10 seconds, sometimes after a few minutes).

I can minimise it by plugging it into a USB 1.1 port, but it still happens (just a lot less). Now I have a lot of stuff on there I want to keep as I use this as my "first step backup" (from here, it goes to DVD if the information is valuable enough to me).

Problem is, I can't copy anything of any size because it keeps dropping out. Its just like the USB plug being pulled out from the system and reconnected again. I have tried other USB devices with no issue (both 1.1 and 2.0).

So what to do.....

Well, here is what I am currently doing.

I want to get this data off the drive so I have setup a FTP server that points to this drive. I am using SmartFTP to queue the downloads from this removable drive to a brand new USB external drive which is functioning beautifully. SmartFTP works well because it auto-resumes the downloads for me.

Is it slow? Oh yes.

Is it painful? Indeed.

Is it working? Remarkably well (albeit quite slow).

If I can bear with the long duration its going to take to get my important data off, then I am done and I can turf this dying drive. Its transferred 1Gb of data so far, and I can hear the drive whirring as it disconnects and reconnects which it has done about 10 times during that transfer.

Update: It appears this post and the comments associated with it disappeared? So here it is reposted.

Update2: Fellow colleague Grant Holliday suggested I use Robocopy. I had completely forgotten about that one.

Update3: Whomever sent me the comment on enclosures was spot on (the comment has also gone, see Update1). It is the enclosure, however the drive is still part of the problem. Its r-e-a-l slow and making weird noises. At least I can copy my data over a bit easier.