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Did the power outage damage my data (or am I just being Paranoid)?

M

Mac Pro 2009

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 3, 2014
88
0
Hey all,
I was running a routine virus scan on my mac pro 2009 when suddenly the power in the house went off and I did not have a UPS (I will buy one soon hopefully). I turned the power back on and my mac booted just fine, i used disk utility to check permissions, smart status and all you standard stuff. Ran a sudo periodic, booted into safe mode and then booted normally. I am really paranoid about data corruption, is there any way to be a 100% sure nothing on my hard drive was corrupted/damaged by the power outage? Usually I would wipe the drive with zeros and do a clean install but it took me months to tweak my mac software settings to be exactly the way I like, I would hate to have to start from scratch again but I will if I need to for absolute peace of mind.
Am I being paranoid? I need 100% performance and reliability from this machine.

Everything seems fine but there are lots of entries in the console so idk...

(And for those wondering, yes I had a backup but it was connected to the power during the blackout and while it seems fine I am just as worried so in the future I will probably have a third backup not connected to power at all times...)

Thoughts?
 
Last edited:
Mac Pro 2009 said:
Hey all,
I was running a virus scan on my mac pro 2009 when suddenly the power in the house went off and I did not have a UPS (I will buy one soon hopefully). I turned the power back on and my mac booted just fine, i used disk utility to check permissions, smart status and all you standard stuff. Ran a sudo periodic, booted into safe mode and then booted normally. I am really paranoid about data corruption, is there any way to be a 100% sure nothing on my hard drive was corrupted/damaged by the power outage? Usually I would wipe the drive with zeros and do a clean install but it took ke months to tweak my mac software settings to be exactly the way I like, I would hate to have to start from scratch again but I will if I need to for absolute peace of mind.
Am I being paranoid? I need 100% performance and reliability from this machine.

Everything seems fine but there are lots of entries in the console so idk...

(And for those wondering, yes I had a backup but it was connected to the power during the blackout and while it seems fine I am just as worried so in the future I will probably have a third backup not connected to power at all times...)

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Providing you weren't manipulating large volumes of data 99.999999% of the time you will be fine stop worrying
 
Lesson learned: no such thing as "routine virus scan". Not needed or wanted.

When a dangerous virus becomes something beyond a paranoid delusion to sell Virus Control Software it will be in front page here as they will finally have something more important than "iPhone 7 1/2 cases coming in scratch and sniff fruit colors" to put there.

Run a repair disk and fix permissions and find something better to worry about.
 
MacVidCards said:
Lesson learned: no such thing as "routine virus scan". Not needed or wanted.

When a dangerous virus becomes something beyond a paranoid delusion to sell Virus Control Software it will be in front page here as they will finally have something more important than "iPhone 7 1/2 cases coming in scratch and sniff fruit colors" to put there.

Run a repair disk and fix permissions and find something better to worry about.
Click to expand...

That's what I did. Are you sure there is nothing else that needs to be done? What about the heavy console activity?
 
What sort of console activity? is it ongoing?

Boot from a repair disk or rescue partition and run Disk Utility's "verify disk" if you haven't already. That should take care of the filesystem structures.

I don't think that there is any way to verify actual data in a file on HFS+. If you want more protection from data errors, put your important data on a NAS running ZFS. Or, format a drive with ZFS yourself, but if you can figure that one out, you probably don't need to be asking about filesystem damage on this forum...

(I should add that random data errors that don't also manage to screw up filesystem metadata are quite rare. I've been in the computer business for 40 years, and I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen data-only damage that wasn't followed shortly by the drive failing entirely.)
 
Mac Pro 2009 said:
Am I being paranoid? I need 100% performance and reliability from this machine.

Everything seems fine but there are lots of entries in the console so idk...

(And for those wondering, yes I had a backup but it was connected to the power during the blackout and while it seems fine I am just as worried so in the future I will probably have a third backup not connected to power at all times...)

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Running a disk scan (basically an fsck) if you want to be paranoid about it. But the file system was upgraded a while back and is much better at checking status and self healing.

NOTHING IN THIS LIFE IS 100%. If you look for stuff to drive yourself crazy about, you'll succeed. :) For example, do you do you know about bit rot. Just by not accessing parts of your drive, bits are flipping randomly. Heck, you could have a random neutreno fly through memory and change a value.

I haven't tried integrity checker. I suspect it's good but its based on a copy as I understand it. So you'd hope that either your backup or original have no variation. Or that if they both were corrupted, that they'd be corrupted in different ways so as to highlight the problem.

Again, I think running a disk scan is probably 'good enough' and maybe a random spot check of the integrity of a few files that you think are particularly important to you.
 
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