It's not a soap box, it's good advice!! Most people use default options which means they mount with access times enabled where every read causes a write. File s

It's not a soap box, it's good advice!! Most people use default options which means they mount with access times enabled where every read causes a write. File systems are more complex than they seem. They also do lots of automatic house keeping in the background. Even the relatively simple ext4 has journaling. Modern file systems will even move and rebalance data in the background. My laptop fell down on the floor recently. Hard disk started reporting errors immediately afterwards. I picked it up to assess the damage and immediately noticed that Linux remounted the drive read only. I turned it off, bought a 4 TB SSD, flashed a live Linux ISO and started reviewing the GNU ddrescue documentation. When recovering data, things should be as static as possible. I'd keep the disk platters from spinning if I could.