I recently had a hard drive go bad on me which actually turned out to be a hard drive going bad. There was definitely something goofy going on with access to the drive. I keep daily backups but a perfect backup of a corrupted source is no good. My most important files are my digital photos, mostly JPG images. I did some visual spot checking but once I hit the 1500 photos I looked for a better alternative. Here’s what I came up with. (This works on Linux. You’ll have to alter your process on Windows and Macs but the principles are the same.)