[Techtalk] finding bad files

[Miriam English]

I have a large drive with an enormous number of files on it, a small 
number of which are broken. I've found they are broken when trying to 
copy them to another drive. When listing them they appear to be the 
proper size, but when copying only part will copy before producing an error.

My problem is in trying to find which files are corrupt.

My first thought was of simply overwriting the files from my backup 
drive. This works fine if I do it by hand, file by file, but if I try 
something automated that only updates files that are the wrong size (I 
don't want to overwrite files that are okay) then it will miss the 
corrupt ones, because they look fine until I try to copy from them.

My next thought was that I could do a fake copy of the files on the 
drive out to /dev/null and log the standard output and standard error 
streams but /dev/null can't handle writing directories.

Any ideas?

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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