Smart backup fails after repairing backup drive

[Handyman]

Yesterday I ran Disk Utility to repair my external USB drive, which I use for Time Machine and SuperDuper backups. (there were lots of issues found...) Note: this was a disk repair, not a permissions repair.

Today my first SuperDuper smart backup (since yesterday's repair) failed. Here are the last two lines of the log:

| 10:25:56 PM | Error | SDCopy: Error deleting /Volumes/Iomega_320/lost+found/dir_377244
| 10:25:56 PM | Error | : Operation not permitted

How should I go about fixing this problem? Thanks.

[dnanian]

Looks like the drive had been damaged and now has some bogus data on it. I'd do an erase-then-copy backup (since we can't remove those damaged files).

[Handyman]

Thanks for the reply.

Since I also have my Time Machine backups on this drive, which an erase would delete, I decided to use the "rm" command (with appropriate switches) to delete the lost+found folder in a command shell.

A subsequent smart copy worked fine. Thanks again.

[dnanian]

OK. I'm rather concerned that if the drive was that damaged, that relying upon any Time Machine backups on the same drive is sketchy at best...

[Handyman]

That's good to know.

Should I replace the drive? Or should I just replace my TimeMachine backups?

Disk Utility found a bunch of problems, but it fixed them, and now it reports none at all... not sure how much faith to put in that however.

[dnanian]

Well, I have no idea what went wrong, so I can't suggest replacing the drive. But starting over (erasing the drive) seems sensible, as long as you don't need the history (and, since these things are pruned, and it's not an 'archive', that's often a reasonable thing to do).

[Handyman]

I'm normally very careful with the external drive, especially while its running, but during the last backup it got pulled to the (carpeted) floor from the couch, an 18" drop, DURING a backup... not good, I know...

I guess I'll reformat it and run a repair frequently, watching for errors.

[dnanian]

Ooof, seriously? That's not good. Well - at the slightest sign of a failure, I'd replace the drive.