241109 ralfconn wrote: > I have a 4Tb hard disk half full of videos and photos my daughter took > with her cell phone over the years, shared with Win11 in a dual boot box > so it is NTFS-formatted. The disk is backed up on a different EXT4 disk > and the backup is performed by (ana)cron via an rsync bash script. > > Last evening there was a power outage. When I rebooted in linux the NTFS > disk would not mount. OK, just e2fsck the disk and it will fix it, I > thought, forgetting that it was an NTFS not EXT. e2fsck -y starts > finding and fixing hundreds of issues on the disk, till I get bored, I > stop it and reboot into Win11, which chkdsk's it and mounts with no > problem in less than 10s. > > Finally I realize the huge mistake I had made, allowing e2fsck to delete > thousands of otherwise fine clusters/nodes/whatever on a filesystem it > does not understand. > > But I have a backup, no problem... till I realize the cron job had > already run so it had overwritten the old files with the new, corrupt > versions. > > Fortunately rsync uses the file access date to quickly find potential > differences and since the e2fsck did not touch those the backup was > still fine. > > Later I found that the disk did not mount in linux due to mount not > finding anymore the NTFS's UUID that I had in fstab, but it did mount > fine with /dev/sdx.
Lesson 1 : always have multiple back-ups on differenct devices, incl >= 1 off-site, eg USB stick in your bank safe-deposit box. Lesson 2 : don't store anything important in Windows format. It's good & lucky you escaped unscathed this time (smile). -- ========================,,============================================ SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatcadotinterdotnet
