I went to open a folder containing 100GB+ of videos and a FCP video project and it after I opened the folder it changed names to another folder on my hard drive with the same name.

Has anyone else had this problem and what is happening? I am very worried.

Thanks in advance

Hi,

no, I never noticed such a problem in 30+ years, but I noted others, like all filenames garbled, or, in one case, all files gone starting with letter "N" to "Z", and such. Those occasions were, however, extremely rare.

I also noticed a drastic increase of file system corruption problems when using them through external connectors like USB, may be caused by user error (not properly eject before disconnect), but also faulty cables and external casings, firmware and driver bugs. Symptoms there are data vanishing, corrupt file systems which demand repair (with an outcome of the repair attempt from everything OK to everything gone, depending on sheer luck), files of 0 size. Roughly the same happens quite often when using a drive through an emulator like VMware - that's why I never combine poor odds by running VMWare against external USB drives when I expect lots of data.

But I never saw the symptom you observe. I mean, this would mean that the data of the original directory has been gone (where?), and your data having taken its place, since it is impossible to have two directories of the same name in the same subdirectory branch. This operation simply seems to complex to be caused by some arbitrary file system malfunction.

What I'd do now is make a full backup of the files immedately, and check the resulting files thoroughly. If the copy is OK, run a chkdsk /f (I guess your are in Windows ...) over the suspect partition. If it doesn't find any inconsitencies, the data is fine, rename the directory back to the correct name, and continue working, I am pretty sure you won't ever experience this error again. Suspect some weird user error, after all it's far too easy in Windows to move whole tree structures when accidentially doing an unfortunate mouse drag in a Windows Explorer window.

In case you run into oddities when running chkdsk, please let us know.

Armin

Thanks Armin for your reply.

I'm using a MacBook Pro and unfortunately, this has happened twice in two years on different hard drives. The only thing in common with the two problems is:
Both on Seagate 5tb hard drives (different drives)
Both Large video projects
They are both backups and I have changed the name to include MASTER for the master copy.

Thankfully I have been able to shut down and restart my laptop to have the file ok and then copy it to another drive.

Any ideas anyone??