I have quite a large collection of audio books stored on a 2-TB WD20EARS hard drive. (31,759 files in 4512 folders.) The books are stored in a hierarchical structure:

F:>Library
........UNHEARD
.............Author
..................Book Title
.......................[filename].mp3
.........iPOD PENDING
.............Author
..................Book Title
.......................[filename].mp3
........HEARD
.............Author
..................Book Title
.......................[filename].mp3

When I have listened to the books in the iPod, I delete the books from the iPod, move the "iPOD PENDING" books into the "HEARD" directory system, choose new books from "UNHEARD" and move them into "iPOD PENDING" and then copy them into the iPod.

I have a large Excel spreadsheet that I use as an index to the books on the hard drive. The spreadsheet contains Author, Title, a brief synopsis of each book, and a flag indicating whether or not I have listened to the book. As new books are added to the collection, I keep the index file up to date. I am very careful with this.

So...two days ago I cleared the iPod, moved the listened-to books into the "HEARD" directory, and using the synopses in the Excel index file chose the new books to load into the player. I was surprised when one of the books I had chosen from the index was not on the hard drive. Had I somehow failed to add it to the index? No, the title was in the index, the files weren't in the computer.

How odd, I thought. When I went to look for that book, I noted that it was one book out of 19 by the same author, Michael Connelly. (Harry Bosch books). Of the 19 Connelly books, 15 were missing, including some that I had already listened to so I know they had been there before.

Now it's kind of tricky to try and figure out what isn't present in a file system, but with the help of a program called "Agent Ransack" I was able to create a complete file/directory listing of my F:> hard drive, format it into something that Excel was happy with, and sort it into the same order as my index file. Then I put the two spreadsheets side by side and went down them line by line, looking for differences. Since my index spreadsheet only goes to folder level (one folder for each book) I only compared author/book title, not individual .mp3 files. I looked for discrepancies, and found some.

Aside from some mis-spellings and typographical errors (which I corrected), I found 41 books that I am quite certain used to be on my hard drive and now are gone. That would be at least 41 folders and about 400 files. (If the missing book was the only one by that author, then the "Author" folder and the Title folder would be gone, so for some books two folders could be missing, not just one.)

Even more disturbing, I found about half a dozen occurrences where Title sub-folders and their files had somehow migrated to be inside incorrect Author folders.

The SMART data for that drive show no obvious problems, so I think the drive may be OK physically. I am concerned about corruption in the file management table (or whatever it is called) on the drive.

What should I do now?

tanstaafl.