G&T I call on your awesome knowladge once again.
I back up all my PhD work to a 250Gb Lacie external hard drive, which I've just dropped a good 5ft onto a wooden floor. It clattered around making an awful racket - but thankfully was turn off at the time.
It seems fine, but there is 10Gb of text, data, and so on which is pretty essential - and rather than check each individual file is there a way to check it's all ok?
I've easiest access to Mac and Unix machines, but if really essential I could borrow a friends windows laptop. Though It's partitioned into Mac Standard....
Do you think my HD drive is on borrowed time now? Should I transfer everything before it breaks?
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I've the "live copy" on my iBook, and 3 backups on the external (I have Silverkeeper that keeps the last 3 backups seperate). And thats it.
It's just my trust in it has faltered a little now. The problem is that my essential data is thousands of small files. Text files, scripts, ps pdfs, astronomy data files. So I can't check them all individually. But as it was off , the likelyhood getting bad sectors is pretty low right?
I'm skint at the moment, but maybe I should sell a few games and get a new external. This ones pretty full anyhow.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
It seems the unix version is fsck but I'm put off trying as:
Now this is a mounted file system, and journaled. Hmmm. I'll have a dig about.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Unmount it first, I guess. Dunno what the command is on a mac, but it should be something like umount (path to where the drive is mounted).
But, but, surely then I couldn't see the drive at all. Thats what I've always taken unmounting to mean....
EDIT: Oh, I'll look into diff'ing but I've a good 10,000 odd files I think, and thought diff only worked on text files.
Really appreciate the suggestions. Cheers!
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
If you unmount the drive, you can't read the contents in a file browser or what have you, which makes it safe to fsck, since fsck works on a device level.
At least, this is all Linux experience talking, so I've no idea if it works on a mac. In fact, I'll bet Apple has some kind of gui-based thing to do what I'm talking about here.
Diff should work on binary files too.