Gary said: Install smartmontools on your system and check the backup drive's SMART status. Something like smartctl -H /dev/sde
If it passes, then reusing is OK. Otherwise, try to recover what you can by making a copy of the disk using dd- rescue. Hans said: To your question for reuse: I would say yes, and if you can reformat it, I would use ext4. It is stable and fast. For the future you might want to install smartd, which checks your harddrive at ruinning time, and warns you, if there are defects. It is posible, to lower the line, so that smartd is warning much earlier than normal (normal is, when I remember correctly, abou 10 percent defections) Thanks both, unfortunately its a 3tb USB external hard drive, with smartd installed and working, except, it doesn't work on external USB drives! And due to its size, it was 93% full with backups, doing a direct copy is not feasible. The backups are all done with obnam, so it just seems that I'll have to reformat, and start a new series of backups on it. And if I get that "Kernel errors report" again, start making alternative plans for replacing the drive, before it dies on me. It was formatted ext4 before, which was why I queried if there was anything better, but I'll have a play with it after dinner. Thanks Sharon. -- A taste of linux = http://www.sharons.org.uk my git repo = https://bitbucket.org/boudiccas/dots TGmeds = http://www.tgmeds.org.uk Debian testing, fluxbox 1.3.5, emacs 24.3.93.1
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