On Dec 27, 2011, at 8:16 PM, Nathan Sims wrote: > > It's still running, chugging out message after message, so it looks like Disk > Warrior is it telling me that the drive is toast. It does say "Speed reduced > by disk malfunction." I hate to lose a year's worth of backups...
Chances are they are already toast. jhfs+ is very unforgiving of Time Machine backups if directory data is compromised. The journal is not checksummed, and it only applies to filesystem metadata anyway, not data. I've consistently found Time Machine backups that have become corrupt to restore corrupt. However, while as a whole it is likely toast, it is unlikely it is worthless in pieces. In this case the parts are worth more than the sum. Do a sector copy to an ISO ASAP. sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk1sX dd if=/dev/disk1sX of=/Volumes/Newdisk/TMbackup.iso bs=1m You can even point Time Machine to this (mounted) ISO for restore, but best to go digging in for individual files, and checking to make sure they are valid. If you care about the data, I wouldn't futz with anything else, not even a repair. You can do a repairs or try to make a better second ISO later. If the drive is dying and you care about the data, it doesn't matter the state of the directory is in when taking the first imaging. It's either fakaked beyond repair or not. > Only a year old! I just checked out Seagate drives online, and they like WD > have only a 1-year warranty. Wow, whatever happened to the industry-wide > 5-year warranties on these things? > Part A is Thailand floods. Part B is they are taking liability off their books sooner. Part C is they are taking part of that liability and turning it into insurance income through optional extended warranties. But it's somewhat rare to see a drive die at 1 year, I think. The profile is bathtub curve, failures early, failures near end of service life. But Time Machine is pretty intensive on how many tiny files it creates, mostly hard links. So it's getting a work out every single hour of its 1 year life. Plausible... Anyway, look at your credit card. It might have an extended warranty. Amex will double the manufacturer warranty. It's less common with consumer Visa MasterCard, but some business Visa MasterCard will also have some extended warranty. 5 year warranties are primarily the domain of SCSI/SAS enterprise drives. If you're curious, smartmontools can be useful to extract substantial details from the drive. It's not easy finding a binary package. I happen to have PowerPC, Intel 32-bit and Intel 64-bit installers, built with MacPorts. I find it an abomination that Apple doesn't include it in client. They do in server. There's no good reason to not have it even if most users won't customize it to track key values indicating old age. Only when serious problems are occurring for a sustained amount of time, in one of a handful of pre-fail categories, will the drive itself propose it's about to die. The self-health assessment of SMART predicts failures less than 50% of the time, the only real way to know this in advance is tracking rate of change with regular extended tests with a custom smartd script. Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
