unsuccessful backup to external drive

oguszt

12/10/23, 3:34 AM

A long shot, but maybe... In Ubuntu 22.04, I tried to back up my files to an external drive before a clean OS install. I did it from the desktop, in three batches ("copy to..."), but now the last batch of folders doesn't show up on the drive and it seems that I lost the data. Checked the drive with the Pop!_OS disk application, which found it intact, but Windows insists to find errors on it, although it cannot repair them (repair ends, window immediately pops up that I should scan the drive). Some affected files contained lots of unsaved work, so I decided to give it a shot and ask you a newbie question: is there a chance it's on there in some corrupted form and recoverable... Or is it worth trying?

Here is what I know happened (still in Ubuntu 22.04). For some time now, I noticed that it takes longer for the system to finalize file transfers than previously. This time, I waited until the transfer flow chart/pie chart disappeared (the transfer itself took 20 mins) and then disconnected the drive (2 TB, USB-C, formatted NTFS). When I tried to reconnect it again, the system didn't recognize it (Error mounting at /media), which happened for the first time to this drive, so I had to mount it from the command line (sudo ntfsfix dev/sda1). Silly me, I should have checked the backup more carefully then, including the subfolders.

0 + 5

hardware

backup

mount

external-hdd

data-recovery

oguszt

12/10/23, 3:57 AM

My bad! However, the root of the problem happened under Ubuntu 22.04, so the Pop people have as much right to claim it belongs here.

user68186

12/10/23, 4:01 AM

Here are some suggestions for the future. 1. Use a file system that fully supports Linux to backup Linux files, such as ext4. 2. Never try to fix a Linux file system or Backup using windows. 3. Use a backup software rather than copy. 4. Properly unmount and**wait for the process to complete** before yanking the external drive out.

oguszt

12/10/23, 4:14 AM

Edited for clarity - all the relevant parts happened under Ubuntu. @user68186 - thank you for the suggestions, especially 2. and 3! As for 4., I did wait for the process to complete. Btw I used to sync my files earlier until my file synchronizer got me in trouble.

vanadium

12/10/23, 2:37 PM

Bad idea to use an ntfs file system for this, that probably was not checked for a long time and started to be inconsistent. At some point, linux won't automount such a drive anymore. Next time, prefer using ext4, and if you need to use ntfs, make sure the file system is checked and clean before doing critical operations like a backup.

oguszt

12/10/23, 6:04 PM

@vanadium - Fair enough, but sadly, I have to use Windows. Although I could organize and backup my work files separately.

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