Syslogs were not very helpful. They indicated I/O errors where there were unreadable bits of the disk. That's about it.

Who made this? A municipality that was providing me with copies of its ballots. I'm grateful for the data (now nicely segregated into hundreds of subdirectories). But what a pain to get at it.

For what it's worth, there's absolutely no standards document of any kind that indicates how somebody might give you digital scans of a million ballots.