Nic
Posts: 1,519 +1
Some months ago I bought a USB2 external hard drive to backup image files of my hard disks. One day I tried to restore a backup but found that the image was corrupt. Since then I always did a file compare after copying the files to the USB drive so that I could recopy any file that was corrupted during the copy. From experience it seemed that around 50% of files always needed to be recopied a second, or even a third time, before I got all files copied error free. I put the problem down to USB drives being unreliable as a backup solution.
Only this week I decided to get a larger hard drive to use as a backup device and this time I fitted it into a drive caddy thus avoiding using USB. And guess what? I still get the same problems. The only thing that both drives had in common was the fact that I formatted them as Compressed NTFS Volumes because both were being used as backup devices, so it seemed like a good idea to maximize the available space.
I have now decompressed both volumes and the file corruption no longer takes place. I should point out that I only ever experienced file corruption when writing to an ntfs compressed volume and not when reading from the volume. It seems to me that I may have discovered a bug in the way Windows XP writes to compressed volumes (I only use XP so I don't know if win2k suffers from the same problem).
Or maybe the problem is unique to my hardware, but this seems unlikely, especially as it occurred on both IDE and USB devices.
Has anyone else here used ntfs compressed volumes before?
What was your experience?
Any useful feedback would be most welcome.:grinthumb
Only this week I decided to get a larger hard drive to use as a backup device and this time I fitted it into a drive caddy thus avoiding using USB. And guess what? I still get the same problems. The only thing that both drives had in common was the fact that I formatted them as Compressed NTFS Volumes because both were being used as backup devices, so it seemed like a good idea to maximize the available space.
I have now decompressed both volumes and the file corruption no longer takes place. I should point out that I only ever experienced file corruption when writing to an ntfs compressed volume and not when reading from the volume. It seems to me that I may have discovered a bug in the way Windows XP writes to compressed volumes (I only use XP so I don't know if win2k suffers from the same problem).
Or maybe the problem is unique to my hardware, but this seems unlikely, especially as it occurred on both IDE and USB devices.
Has anyone else here used ntfs compressed volumes before?
What was your experience?
Any useful feedback would be most welcome.:grinthumb