File corruption - what a nightmare

Irene McC said:
Update

So I did restart it. It's now been running for nine and a half hours and is at 52% with an estimated 7.32 hours left to go. It appears not to have sped through previously checked areas, I think all was lost in the power outage šŸ˜•

Holding thumbs. It is after all my birthday tomorrow (12th) and having computer problems is not on my wish list!
Click to expand...
Wow, at that rate you'll have your 13th birthday before it's finished! šŸ˜‰

Hopefully that levity is excusable. I'm sorry you're having this issue.
 
Well I'm going to be glass half full and fully expect you to recover those files so enjoy the sleep overnight while the process does its job. I'd imagine there's quite a few here waiting to advise on backup programs/ strategy etc once the files are recovered too (this obviously isn't going to happen again).
 
Last edited:
Irene McC said:
Update

So I did restart it. It's now been running for nine and a half hours and is at 52% with an estimated 7.32 hours left to go. It appears not to have sped through previously checked areas, I think all was lost in the power outage šŸ˜•

Holding thumbs. It is after all my birthday tomorrow (12th) and having computer problems is not on my wish list!
Click to expand...

Touching wood here that you can recover your files. There's a chance if you did not do a lot of writing to your hard drive before you realized what was happening.
 
Irene McC said:
I constantly accessed and wrote to it... I just would like to complete the CHKDSK and read its report and hopefully findings. In order to know what's going on
Click to expand...
All the best, Irene - it's never a good idea to hang one's hopes too high in such cases, but the attempt is always worth it before giving up and essentially throwing away two years' worth of files.

I read your comments about cloud storage earlier; I hear you, but maybe it's still something to look into - if only to start using it now. That's what I did, a few years back; older stuff resides on backups (on HDDs, mostly, even though some of them are in storage outside of any housing or direct ways of accessing them, hence, dormant).

I'll also switch my NAS this year (or early next year) and put another three discs into long-term "dormant" storage - but those are "just" taken out of the overall backup loop which itself will continue (mostly using "hot swap" on RAID systems) because I'm running out of space. Anyhow, essentially, I'm now at a three-fold backup locally (for photography only - work only gets two layers šŸ™‚), with two additional sets of cloud storage. "Current" processed shots have their own dedicated cloud drive - which has been in place since late 2019, so, for five years now; most, if not all of the images on that drive have been published on this forum as well. Other data (including another backup of the "current" images) sits on another cloud service. Furthermore, we use Sharepoint at work (duh ... but at least I have a pretty complete work data backup there now).

I admit it's all rather tedious and may be kind of overblown, but I've had my share of data loss and data corruption and don't want to go through major incidents of this kind again. I lost a couple of school years' worth of material once, including all documentation and marks - completely! That was a royal mess to be sure; thankfully, most of it (but not everything!) was already past its immediate use by then.

M.
 
MoonMind said:
All the best, Irene - it's never a good idea to hang one's hopes too high in such cases, but the attempt is always worth it before giving up and essentially throwing away two years' worth of files.

I read your comments about cloud storage earlier; I hear you, but maybe it's still something to look into - if only to start using it now. That's what I did, a few years back; older stuff resides on backups (on HDDs, mostly, even though some of them are in storage outside of any housing or direct ways of accessing them, hence, dormant).

I'll also switch my NAS this year (or early next year) and put another three discs into long-term "dormant" storage - but those are "just" taken out of the overall backup loop which itself will continue (mostly using "hot swap" on RAID systems) because I'm running out of space. Anyhow, essentially, I'm now at a three-fold backup locally (for photography only - work only gets two layers šŸ™‚), with two additional sets of cloud storage. "Current" processed shots have their own dedicated cloud drive - which has been in place since late 2019, so, for five years now; most, if not all of the images on that drive have been published on this forum as well. Other data (including another backup of the "current" images) sits on another cloud service. Furthermore, we use Sharepoint at work (duh ... but at least I have a pretty complete work data backup there now).

I admit it's all rather tedious and may be kind of overblown, but I've had my share of data loss and data corruption and don't want to go through major incidents of this kind again. I lost a couple of school years' worth of material once, including all documentation and marks - completely! That was a royal mess to be sure; thankfully, most of it (but not everything!) was already past its immediate use by then.

M.
Click to expand...
Yes, drives must be retired, hardly ever mentioned but so important (along with keeping the backup drive no more than 70% full, etc).
 
1733974765612.png


Finally it's all done (05:39 am local time) - and now what? that's all inconclusive since I've definitely got missing data and corrupted files.
 
Irene McC said:
View attachment 516573

Finally it's all done (05:39 am local time) - and now what? that's all inconclusive since I've definitely got missing data and corrupted files.
Click to expand...
I've never had CHKDSK tell me that there was a problem ...
Not since Windows NT 4.x, anyway

It does mean that it's fixed whatever problems it did find. It's weird like that!

Now you need to find corrupt files and see if you can find uncorrupted versions of them.
 
Irene, as far as I can see, it's not too encouraging to tell you the truth - however, it seems that at least the hardware isn't to blame: no bad sectors, short parse times for indeces. I still hope that when reparsing the orphaned files, there were some restored records, but your files seem to still be "there" (i.e. not orphaned, as in lost from any index; still optainable), so, nothing definite, and not really encouraging as to the cause of the problem. The drive itself seems pretty healthy, though.

Which means, I'm sorry to say, that we may look at a software glitch, which means things may be unrecoverable (physically overwritten). But I'd go looking for improvements on file quality first before determining that. On the upside, it (probably) means that images you haven't touched in the last couple of weeks should (or at least may) be okay.

For the time being, I'd mainly suggest not using your usual cataloguing/processing software (Capture One, I seem to remember); for image viewing, XnView MP does a good job and has been very reliable for me over the last ten years:

www.xnview.com

Powerful Image ViewerĀ· XnView MP | XnView.com

XnView, one of the best and popular image viewer. It allows you to view, manage, resize and edit your photos.
www.xnview.com www.xnview.com

Since I don't know your preferences and needs for processing, I can't suggest a post processing tool, but I'm not that knowledgeable about them anyway, so others may be of more help regarding this aspect.

M.

P.S. Sincerely, happy birthday - it's still that!
 
Thanks @MoonMind for your thoughts - I tend to agree with the 'not encouraging' viewpoint.

I have a bought stand-alone perpetual version of Capture One Pro v16.4.5.2312 and I use Irfanview as well as XnView and FastStone so it could be anything along the line and since it seems intermittent, it is a vexing problem to find the root of.

I found some shock surprises with a folder from 2014 that I had re-processed some months ago and that was missing some edited images (just blanks with red X's through them in the viewer) but the RAW files all appeared to be in the Capture folder intact.
At this point I am wary of mounting the drive to go through folders at all. I have been looking at what's on the backup drive and while a lot is happily there, I fear finding stuff down the line that is corrupted, because it's impossible to go through every folder and file to check.

I really don't know what's going on
 
Irene McC said:
Thanks @MoonMind for your thoughts - I tend to agree with the 'not encouraging' viewpoint.

I have a bought stand-alone perpetual version of Capture One Pro v16.4.5.2312 and I use Irfanview as well as XnView and FastStone so it could be anything along the line and since it seems intermittent, it is a vexing problem to find the root of.

I found some shock surprises with a folder from 2014 that I had re-processed some months ago and that was missing some edited images (just blanks with red X's through them in the viewer) but the RAW files all appeared to be in the Capture folder intact.
At this point I am wary of mounting the drive to go through folders at all. I have been looking at what's on the backup drive and while a lot is happily there, I fear finding stuff down the line that is corrupted, because it's impossible to go through every folder and file to check.

I really don't know what's going on
Click to expand...

I won't help you current predicament, but Windows has a built in backup system called File History. File History will automagically back up files and even archive several versions of the same files so that if you make a mistake, you can find the version without that mistake and restore it.

All the File History requires is a backup hard drive. You'll typically want a backup hard drive that's ~2x the size of your data drive. Or bigger if you can. A bigger drive will enable File History to store archive versions of more files.
 
Irene McC said:
Thanks @MoonMind for your thoughts - I tend to agree with the 'not encouraging' viewpoint.

I have a bought stand-alone perpetual version of Capture One Pro v16.4.5.2312 and I use Irfanview as well as XnView and FastStone so it could be anything along the line and since it seems intermittent, it is a vexing problem to find the root of.

I found some shock surprises with a folder from 2014 that I had re-processed some months ago and that was missing some edited images (just blanks with red X's through them in the viewer) but the RAW files all appeared to be in the Capture folder intact.
At this point I am wary of mounting the drive to go through folders at all. I have been looking at what's on the backup drive and while a lot is happily there, I fear finding stuff down the line that is corrupted, because it's impossible to go through every folder and file to check.

I really don't know what's going on
Click to expand...
FastStone Viewer is quick and pretty good at picking up damaged files.

EVERYTHING.EXE is excellent for finding multiple copies of any file or files, and uses the default image viewer to open them. You can use it to identify damaged or undamaged copies of files relatively easily.

Often, IME, an embedded thumbnail is not displayable, but the actual image is still OK. Often, refreshing the thumbnail corrects the error.

Just some random thoughts - it's getting late, and I am exhausted.

HTH.
 
I was going to recommend my own backup software to Irene but alas it's not available for Windows. Sounds like what we're looking for here is software that archives previously backed up files that have been deleted/ written over by newer files. I'm a little bit perplexed that her software didn't look after her in this respect and I think it should have done. I'm sure there is plenty of software that does this correctly on Windows, so if anyone can recommend their own software that does this (and I imagine it would help greatly if the software has actually dug you out of this hole and recovered a previously deleted/ written over file) that would be a great help, a sort of inferior but very important birthday present šŸ˜›.
 
a few thoughts. Iā€™m by no means an expert.

- whatā€™s causing the data-corruption, to prevent further issues. I can imagine this being a very pressing question.

- Back-up strategy. Maybe something for in another (existing) topic? Lots of options and dependencies. Mac versus PC, cloud or not, etc.

www.alanranger.com

How to Back Up Photos: The Best 3-2-1 Backup Method Guide

Discover the 3-2-1 method to back up photos. Learn the best cloud storage, external drives, and software to safeguard your images. Protect your memories today!
www.alanranger.com www.alanranger.com


- Damage control. How to trace and possibly replace or repair corrupted files, without spending days/weeks.

www.quora.com

Is there any easy way to check a large amount of files for data corruption?

Answer (1 of 3): The easy way to do a large number of things is to script it, if no-one has already written an automatic tool for the job. Then itā€™s just computer time rather than human time; come back tomorrow. If you havenā€™t had the foresight to create hashes (checksums) of each file in advanc...
www.quora.com www.quora.com
 

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