Final Cut Backups

I had moved my current Final Cut Backups folder from default location on boot drive movies folder to an external thunderbolt drive. Today the thunderbolt drive with my Final Cut Backups came back as a bad disk that needed repair. I repaired and reformatted the disk and recreated a Final Cut Backups folder on it.

Question; How do I get Final Cut Pro X to re-generate the backup that was lost to this disk?

Hi DigiCal
Since you reformatted the drive, all data was erased.
There are 2 ways to get the data back; sort of.
The first way is if you have a back-up drive, you do, don't you? I highly recommend at least 2 back-ups of everything and 3 is better including a clone.
If you have the back-up data on another drive, just click and drag the Folder or the files, between disks or use copy and paste. Make sure to place it in same folder location. You will need to make sure FCPX still links to the reformatted drive. It may have reset itself if the drive was missing/corrupt.
If you do not have separate back-ups of the files, then all of your intermittent back-up files will have been lost.
You can get FCPX to create new back-ups by starting up FCPX and launching the events/projects you wish to have the back-ups made for. You will not ever recover the incremental back-ups from before.
Make sure you have set the location you want for the Back Up folder in the Library Info pane before closing the project. In this case, FCPX will create the necessary files.
I might be wrong, but I think you have to make at least one small correction/adjustment in each project in order for the back-up routine to get triggered.
In all of the above, I am assuming you removed the original files from your boot drive.

Hope this helps, Greg

^ Thanks Greg.

I'm in the middle of shuffling things around and wanted to get the Final Cut Backups off my Samsung 1TB 850 pro SSD boot drive, so yes they were purged from the boot SSD. I've recently dedicated a 6 TB drive for Final Cut Backups, it is a bare drive that is docked to a Seagate Desktop Thunderbolt Dock.

However, there should still be a Time Machine Backup of the Final Cut Backups on my 3 TB FW800 G-Drive. Your post has sparked me to check there, thanks again.

My edit drive is a Promise Pegasus2 R4, and I will keep a copy of the Final Cut Backups on the Pegasus2 R4 and an internal 2 TB HDD too in case there are other issues with the drive. I hadn't put my Final Cut backups on the Pegasus2 R4 as it had been recommended to have them on a separate drive. Thought I was in good shape deploying a dedicated external drive for Final Cut Backup files. I believe the failure of this extrnal backup drive was my fault as I had inadvertantly partially disconnected its SATA port from the dock so hopefully the drive itself is fine. It's a new drive but I've read most drive failures occur with new drives or with old drives so I hope I'm not using a bum new drive.

Sounds like you are on the right path.
You should be able to restore from TM just fine. The only issue you may encounter is when was the last back up made and were the files on the boot drive or the external. Either way it should mean you have your old FCPX back up files.
Yes I recommend that you keep the BU files on different drive than rest of library. Once there, tho, you then need to back that drive up. It is kind of like looking into a mirror with a mirror behind you

SATA is a bi-directional protocol, so unintended dismounts will not get you a Gold Medal here or in Olympic gymnastics. It can cause corruption if the drive is active. Give it a chance.
I put labels on the connector cables so I have a small chance of not disconnecting the wrong device.

Best of Luck, Greg

Backup files restored from Time Machine and now backed up on other drives too.

I've got a dockable drive on order again to go with the thunderbolt dock. These dockables are hard to find in 2015 as they've been replaced with a newer model that isn't compatible with the dock. The replacement product is USB only but retailer photos have shown the older design. For now I've got a bare SATA drive removed from one of the newer cases connected to the thunderbolt dock. When the correct dockable drive/case comes in that I'll pop the bare drive into it for a more secure connection with the dock.

DigiGal wrote: ...I believe the failure of this extrnal backup drive was my fault as I had inadvertantly partially disconnected its SATA port from the dock so hopefully the drive itself is fine. It's a new drive but I've read most drive failures occur with new drives or with old drives so I hope I'm not using a bum new drive.

Here are two good utilities for testing a drive. I usually don't test smaller "transfer" drives, just format and use them. For larger production drives including RAID I usually hammer them with these utilities for a while before putting them in production. Drive failures tend to be progressive, so unless you're confident your drive problem was totally user-induced it might be a good idea to check it.

Scannerz: scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
DiskTestR: diglloydtools.com/disktester.html

Unfortunately much backup software has no way to verify the backup. Carbon Copy's "verify" procedure only entails booting from the drive which doesn't tell anything about most of the data. The OS X Disk Utility will not do a surface scan, only a file system check. Verifying a backup ideally means reading every block in the backup and if backup-specific internal data structures are used, also verifying those. Acronis True Image backup software does this but I only use it on Windows, not Mac, since Time Machine and Carbon Copy are otherwise so good.

CCC actually does a check-sum, which is about the best way to verify copy/backup of files. The ultimate test SHOULD be testing the drive as a boot volume.

I was referring to whether a backup can later be verified with confidence. There are three conceptual layers involved: (1) The physical storage layer composed of disk blocks, (2) The filesystem layer composed of structures unique to that filesystem, and (3) The application layer which may have application-specific data structures in the backup file.

A failure in any one of these layers can mean the backup is compromised or unusable. The only comprehensive way to check a backup is verify all those layers. To verify the physical layer all blocks comprising the file must be read. The correct reading of each disk block is validated by CRC data: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check

It is possible for every disk block to be good but the filesystem have errors. To verify the filesystem layer a volume-wide check must be run, e.g, Disk Util or 3rd party equivalents. To verify the backup file itself (if applicable) an application-specific utility must be run which has knowledge of those structures. E.g, you can't verify a LightRoom, Access, or SQL Server database by just checking the disk or filesystem -- it takes application-specific utilities.

In the case of OS X you can unfortunately easily have a Time Machine or Carbon Copy backup which is compromised because a bad block later develops. TM has no verify feature, and just booting a CC clone disk does not exercise all the disk blocks comprising the backup. CC does have an option called "Find and Replace corrupted files", which (if used) builds an MD5 checksum for each backed up file. This supposedly can be used to later verify the backup, although there's no denoted verify procedure in the UI.

Besides CC, the DigLloyd tool IntegrityChecker can be used to generate SHA1 hash data that can later be used to validate an archival backup: diglloydtools.com/integritychecker.html

Fortunately I don't think either Carbon Copy or TM have any (or many) application-specific data structures -- IOW the backup does not consist of a proprietary file format. So just doing a complete disk scan plus filesystem check of either a TM or CC backup is probably pretty good. There are various utilities for this.

Unfortunately all these steps incur additional time or procedural complexity. Acronis has a very easy-to-use validate backup function, although I'm not sure internally how it works.

The main thing to remember is your backups are not necessarily reliable. It's a tradeoff to just make additional backups vs using extra steps to validate fewer backups.