[plug] RPi USB drive backups

[Brad Campbell]

On 20/3/25 10:26, Chris McCormick wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for your reply.
> 
> smartctl seems to think the hardware is fine. I did smartctl -a and it reported nothing unusual. I also ran a self test and this was the result:
> 

Smartctl only asks the disk to do an internal SMART check. Firstly, disks lie. I've had drives report clean SMART and then literally stop responding on the bus the next day. Pining for the fjords.
It could be the disk, it could be the power supply, it could be the USB-SATA bridge, it could be the USB cable or it could be the pi.

If you get IO errors, something bad is happening that Linux had zero control over.

I'd start with something simple like a full speed, full media read : dd if=/dev/sdx bs=1M of=/dev/null

Then again, it might be choking on writes. You'll be able to have a look at the dmesg/syslog to see what the actual errors are.
Until you nail the IO errors, anything you do is likely to a) choke, and b) lose data.

You don't want (b).

Regards,
Brad