Computer crash while backing up

julianhopkins

Hi,

I have a repeating problem which may or may not have anything to do with Zotero. But I am asking in case anyone has had something similar.

The problem is: when I am backing up to my external drive, my PC (Windows Vista with all updates etc.) crashes - a sudden shut down, no warning, no blue screen, nothing. This happens with two different external hard drives.

When I reboot, all seems normal. But the backup is not done, and that makes me worried.

I am using fbackup (http://www.fbackup.com/) at the moment. But it also happened when I was trying to manually copy over my Zotero folder. The folder is about 3GB by now.

So I was thinking: is there any reason why the Zotero folder may be crashing the system?
* Is it because I had Firefox open? (I will try without, can't remember if I tried that before)
* I know that some of the Zotero files have impossbly long names and they get ignored in backups (it has worked fine before). Can this be having an effect?

I can't think of any other reasons. Please advise if anyone has a suggestion. Not being able to backup makes me very nervous. I'm doing a PhD on blogs, and all my data is on my PC.

Thanks,
Julian

adamsmith

unlikely, but hard to tell for sure.
One thing, though - it's a better idea to backup the Zotero folder with FF closed anyway (because of the way the database file works).

julianhopkins

OK thanks for the feedback. Another attempt at a manual copying over has been successful, so I dunno what the issue was... It may have been that Firefox was open the first time, and I take your point re backing up anyway, thanks.