I chatted about this earlier, but papps broke pretty good during a back up last night. I set the backup in motion and when I came in this morning, it said it had finished and was complete.
But the drive wouldn't allow me to access anything. It showed up as zero size and would run Chkdsk. When I ejected the drive and put it back in, it would prompt for autorun, but then would ask what program to use to open the file. It shows no files on it whatsoever.
Turns out the backup isn't complete either unfortunately, and I have lost a little bit of work. I have a previous back for a lot of it. and can get some stuff that was posted or emailed since, but I lost some stuff which is too bad.
My theory is that the culprit was an Open Office installation. I had had problems with the installation, but hadn't gone back and removed or tried to repair it. My reaoning is that:
A. I had already had problems with it.
B. I have all files on from the drive backed up until it reaches the Open Office App folder. There is nothing in that folder or any other folder that follows it...
I think I am happy to have an idea of the cause, but still very frustrated at how avoidable this could have been...
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Something like this is nearly always a hardware issue. Stressing a drive by writing a lot of files at once (like the OpenOffice.org install) or reading a lot of files on some drives puts more stress on it. A drive close to failing is more likely to fail.
You could try reformatting and restoring your backup (or an older backup that is more complete).
In the future, whenever you encounter a drive error, you should stop whatever you're doing and determine what is going on before using it further or you'll suffer dataloss.
Sometimes, lesser quality drives will overheat after a lot of writing. Once cooled down, they may work again. They may be permanently damaged, though.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I think there has got to be some truth to that, but I have had problems before with the built in backup. I definitely should have started over when I had a problem with the open office installer, but I will be manually backing up from now on.
It turns out that my last back up, which I had not tested, failed also. It just didn't crash the drive. This coupled with previous back up issues has caused me to completely lose faith in the built-in backup.
I am dealing with over 3 gigs of data, so it really is quite a haul. I am attempting data recovery and then i will see if I can still use the drive.
It is a nice flash drive, highly rated everywhere i looked:
Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB.
The USB ports on the back of my desktop are acting up, and I used one of them when I was backing up. So that could be a factor as well.
I was able to get access to the drive periodically on other ports, and have recovered enough to salvage things...