Hi All – I was reading with interest the previous ‘Backups Bug’ reported in March 2017 whereby certain subfolders were not being copied.
I’ve just discovered a problem with my PR2100 backups I had not experienced before where certain nested subfolders were showing a reduced number of folders/files compared to the source (via windows File Manager).
Took me most of the day to drill down to the offending subfolders to see all the data was actually there but the folders above consistently showed a reduced number of files and corresponding file sizes.
I’m not that technical but seems to me the backup command is working ok (in that all source files seem to be copied) but the file statistics are not being updated properly.
I also tested copying the folders & files directly in Windows (avoiding the WD backup option) and the result was exactly the same so perhaps this issue relates to the overall information (File Allocation Table?) not being updated correctly.
File data showed 12,601 files/1,406 folders 70,130,325,052 bytes in source – 10,263 files/ 1,377 folders 59,777,125,112 bytes in backup/destination folder. Very misleading since all data seems to be copied/backed-up ok. This happens both with USB and Internal backup options.
Anyone else having a similar issue?
2 Feb 2020 update
I think I know what causes this issue – kind of difficult to know since WD don’t have a separate file manager so have to use windows file manager. I suspected certain charters in the filenames were causing the issue but tested them and all ok.
I also remembered that I used to get error messages in windows when copying files with pathnames that were too long, but for a while now I haven’t – and this I suspect may be the issue. Using file copy (not WD backup command) I copied filenames with long paths from one WD directory to a separate backup directory and although the files got copied ok the file properties info was not updated correctly.
The source files were ok in length but when copied to the backup some additional sub-directories were added to the pathname (via the WD backup command adding the backup name to the pathname) which made the pathname longer than the original one. So when the files are copied or backed-up they became ‘too long’ but no notification or error is displayed - so although all the files are actually copied, it appears they are not if you simply look at the overall file properties.
I’m not that technical but hope I’ve explained this properly. I’m not sure how to further test it or who to report it to (kind of done with it now!), but I suggest to anyone with similar issues to keep the backup name as short as possible so that any elongation of the backup pathname is kept as short as possible.
