Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/07/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>> It was all there and I opened a few photo files to be sure >> everything was o.k., then the next time I checked, that hard >> drive was totally empty. > > THAT is a software problem. Thinking about it some more, I think I know how to cause this software problem. Basically, I can cause this software problem by yanking the USB or FireWire cable out of the computer before the backup is really really done. When you are copying data to a disk, the copying program will tell you that it has finished the copy, but what it's really telling you is that it has finished copying the data to the disk drivers. Their job is to get it to the actual disk, and in the interests of speed, all modern disk drivers write the data in an order that is different from the order in which you send it, sometimes holding onto many megabytes that you might think have been written to the disk, but which have not. I've used Macs for so long that I'm starting to forget the little tiny details of Windows, but there's an incantation that you need to give to a USB- or FireWire-connected device that tells the driver that you have imminent plans to disconnect it, and requesting that driver to finish copying all of the saved data to the disk. (On a Mac, it's select/command E). If the files you are copying are big, and you didn't follow the prescribed steps for closing and disconnecting a cable-connected disk, then some of the critical directory information might not be there. This is just a theory; I have no idea what procedure you are actually following. Brian