Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive error from SMART

[Dale]

Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 05:03:01PM -0500 schrieb Dale:
>> Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 1:08 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>>>> I remounted the drives and did a backup.  For anyone running up on this,
>>>> just in case one of the files got corrupted, I used a little trick to
>>>> see if I can figure out which one may be bad if any.  I took my rsync
>>>> commands from my little script and ran them one at a time with --dry-run
>>>> added.  If a file was to be updated on the backup that I hadn't changed
>>>> or added, I was going to check into it before updating my backups.
>>> Unless you're using the --checksum option on rsync this isn't likely
>>> to be effective.
>> My hope was if it was corrupted and something changed then I'd see it in
>> the list.  If nothing changed then rsync wouldn't change anything on the
>> backups either.  I'll look into that option tho.  May be something for
>> the future.  ;-)  I suspect it would slow things down quite a bit tho. 
> The advantage of an integrity scheme (like ZFS or comparing with a checksum
> file) over your rsync approach is that you only need to read all the datas™
> from one drive instead of two. Plus: if rsync actually detects a change, it
> doesn’t know which of the two drives introduced the error. You need to find
> out yourself after the fact (which probably won’t be hard, but still, it’s
> one more manual step).
>


In this case, if something had changed, I'd have no problem manually
checking the file to be sure which was good and which was bad.  Given
the error is recent on my drive, I'd suspect the backups to still be a
good file.  For that reason, I'd suspect the backup file to be good
therefore not to be overwritten.  I was trying to avoid a bad file
replacing a good file on the backup which then destroys all good files
and leaves only bad ones.  This is why I like that SMART at least let me
know there is a problem. 

Sometimes things has to be done manually which is often the best way. 
Just depends on the situation I guess. 

Dale

:-)  :-)