Close call
Sometime yesterday evening I mounted the USB drive, fired off my backup script, and went out for dinner. Made the mistake of leaving the drive online when we went back to Consonance (more about that in a later post) for the dead dog Schroedinger's Cat filk. This morning, I found that the drive was busy, and the locate database updater was thoroughly hung in I/O wait. sync hung, too. I ended up powering down.
After rebooting, I fired up the USB drive and attempted an fsck. It hung, with a mysterious message about a USB disconnect. Urk!
Before I started using the USB enclosure for backups, I used removable IDE trays. In fact, there was one still in my workstation, and another in the suspect USB enclosure. Made the swap, powered up, and ran fsck again. This time, it worked. Hmm. I don't think I ought to trust that USB enclosure anymore. The tray is less convenient -- in spite of the fact that it's nominally hot-swappable, Linux doesn't really support it. And the rack has a fan. Blaugh. Need to start cycling through multiple backup drives. And get offsite backups going.