An important part of any developer's life is the BACKUP. Planning for the rainy day where our computer is lost, damaged or stolen. To that end, we take important time out of our days to backup our code, notes, executables to a safe medium.
So imagine my total disgust and desolation to find that the backups I have been saving to a 8Gbytes Cruzer USB flashdrive are CORRUPT!! I really could not believe it. Here are some symptoms:
1) Zip files copied to and back from the USB disk could not be opened.
2) But sometimes they could be opened but the contents were corrupt.
3) Copying folders themselves worked slightly better, but sometimes individual files were corrupt.
4) The corruptions tended to be 3-6 blocks of translocated data. But sometimes the entire file was fragmented with differences.
I can NOT even tell you the sick feeling in my stomach to do a difference between a 400Mbytes backup folder and the original folder only to find literally 100's of differences. I never saw this with Windows XP or Vista, but now I have Windows 7.
However, here is some good news: the issue did now seem to show up on my smaller, older USB drives (e.g. 500 Mbytes).
Unfortunately, it was an issue on my Toshiba 1Tbyte external hard drive. I almost cried. I turned off Write caching on my hard drive, but that did not seem to help. Googling found other people with complaints but not the large outcry which I would expect. This makes me worry that there is something wrong with my system or maybe a virus. But I still have to check for perhaps a better USB driver.
This issue may be correlated with size. A 400Mbyte binary seemed to always be corrupted while I was able to transfer two 200Mbyte binaries without a problem. However, I first noticed the problem with zip files as small as 120Mbytes and even 2Mbytes.
