-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I'm a bit concerned about the health status of my usb based hard disk backup. One of my recent backups (rsync) prematurely exited with I/O errors in syslog. I fsck'ed the drive, fixing some 2000 errors like
/------------- Free inodes count wrong for group #1535 (11199, counted=11196). Fix? yes Directories count wrong for group #1535 (416, counted=419). Fix? yes \------------- and bitmap differences. I did a new backup to the drive and it seems everything went fine. I also checked some of the data on the disk with git-fsck for consistency. What concerns me a bit is that after each backup, when I force a new fsck, I get this: /------------- e13-v15:~# e2fsck -f /dev/disk/by-label/maxtor e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008) Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 3A: Optimizing directories Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information maxtor: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** maxtor: 5059092/61063168 files (0.7% non-contiguous), 97098262/122096000 blocks \------------- (the filesystem was modified line). I don't recall seeing this line too often in the past. Does this indicate problems with the disk? Unfortunately, smartmontools won't work with usb and I hesitate to break the warranty seal to mount the disk directly. Are there any other tools to check the health status of a usb disk? Is fsck.ext3's badblocks option (-c) useful for usb disks or is it somehow inefficiently interfering with the usb transmission and/or the disk's internal controller? Thanks for helping to make me sleep better ;-) Cheers, Johannes NB: The disk contains several hundred GB of data and each backup is created with hard linking to the previous one. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkmBcbsACgkQC1NzPRl9qEV1QgCeLS2ijVvi0yAYr5paArhLg7iZ EPsAn2F8IfhIBqw/20bI6akmiMlf+kT+ =AZOQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
