FFS throws sync.ffs_lock and ERROR_FILE_CORRUPT errors

[iGaidhlig]

Have been using FFS for years on Windows (Windows 10 at the moment) with a Mirror setting to an external hard drive I turn on manually to run a backup. Never any problems, tonight for no apparent reason all hell broke loose. I am the only user on this machine and I have full admin right, running FFS normally or "Run as Admin" makes no difference to the errors
First I got some recycle bin error, as recommendation of the FFS forum was to see if there was a visible FFS recycle folder someone on the destination drive and to delete that, which I did. Next time, I got sync.ffs_lock errors.
I tried restarting the whole system first, made no difference. Tried installing the latest version (I was on whatever came before 11.25), no difference.
As my setup is very simple, I then uninstalled FFS and re-installed it, no difference. More forum searches suggested to set <LockDirectoriesDuringSync Enabled="true"/> to false. That made the sync.ffs_lock error disapper but now it's complaining
Cannot read directory "F:\Downloads\sealach\FILENAME".
ERROR_FILE_CORRUPT: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. [DirReaderPlus::readDir->c0000102]
and I'm fresh out of ideas.

[iGaidhlig]

Right I don't know if that was the cause of FFS falling over or the effect of it falling over, but when I turned the external drive on today, Windows flashed me a message about problems with the external disk and after running the repart function, the FFS is doing backups as before.

[xCSxXenon]

FFS creates a .ffs_lock file when it starts working so other FFS sessions can see it and know to wait until the first operation(s) are finished. Sounds like your drive had an issue during the sync, causing it to drop out. That results in the .ffs_lock file not being deleted, whatever data you were writing to it to be corrupt/missing, and Windows sets the "dirty" flag on that volume. You can delete the .ffs_lock file manually, that won't cause any issues and will allow FFS to work normally. You also need to run a chkdsk on that volume to repair the file system and reset to "dirty" flag back to normal.

I would then recommend using "GSmartControl", or any other program that can read SMART data, to check the external drive for any issue. Some external drives don't pass that information via USB, in which case you should just replace that external drive out of an abundance of caution. If you can read the SMART data, you will want to look at the attributes, specifically:
- Bad blocks
- Reallocated sectors
- Uncorrectable errors
- CDC errors
- more
You can post a screen shot of the attribute window, if you get that far, and I can look at it. It is possible that it was a weird glitch or maybe a bad USB port/cable that caused the external to flake out for a split second.

[iGaidhlig]

Thanks - if it comes back, I'll try looking for the .ffs_lock file. But for now, the Windows interal disk repair function seems to have done the trick.

caused the external to flake out for a split second.

Ah in which case I may even know the culprit, I do recall the cat bouncing through the cables hanging from the desk round about the time!