Clone Disaster

[dnanian]

I just don't have any information here to work with, unfortunately. I have no idea what might have happened - I'm not aware of any case where SuperDuper! would do something like this... if your salvage recovers the log, could you please send it to me?

What's especially weird is that 'random' stuff is present at random locations on the drive. We go through them one folder at a time. You wouldn't see this kind of thing if we had just randomly stopped: it really seems to me like the drive failed while we were copying (maybe) and the OS never told us that things had failed (remember we use the OS to actually copy the files)... but even then, it wouldn't have removed things, nor would it have copied only a few items.

I suppose the source drive's folder structure could have been damaged in a weird way, too, where the files weren't present in the folder list as we stepped through. But, why would it have taken hours and hours to copy? (That implies the above.)

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This is a horrible thing to have happened, and -- really -- I have no idea how it occurred, or how it could have. But please, everyone, regardless of what solution you use to back up: test your backups. Nothing is perfect: neither SuperDuper!, nor drives, nor OSX, nor your own technique. Especially if you're going to 'voluntarily' erase your drive, check that things are OK first! It only takes a few minutes to do.

Also, remember that if your data is important to you, you should back it up to more than one location. If you back it up to only one place, and your drive fails after you've erased it, you've lost that data... so please, please (please) be careful!