[shifuimam]

I have a slight problem.

My ex had a 1.5GHz (I think) 12" iBook G4 for awhile, and we used it on vacations to transfer pictures from our digital cameras. He has since sold the iBook, and everything was backed up on an external USB hard drive.

Here's the issue - images have gotten corrupted. I don't know how, but I have multiple GIF and JPEG files that are completely ruined. Some of them won't open at all; others have huge chunks of other images or bars of color across the images. I fortunately have additional backups of most of them, but the images on the hard drive that are corrupt have all come from file transfers from this iBook.

I don't know if it matters (it seems to for applications, at least), but the images were transferred from an HSF+ volume to a FAT32 volume. The iBook was running 10.3.9.

Has anyone here ever had problems with OS X and/or iPhoto randomly corrupting files? I've never had this problem on my Windows machine, so I'm leaning toward the issue stemming from something related to the iBook or OS X... the images weren't corrupted on the iBook, BTW. They seem to have gotten corrupted in transferring them to the FAT32 volume.

[Big Mac]

That shouldn't have happened, but you also should have thought twice before using a PC formatted disk to backup a Mac.

[jmiddel]

Backing up files from one file system to an entirely different one will screw things up royally unless there is an application that can convert the one format to the other before copying them to the FAT32 volume.

[TETENAL]

I have to disagree with the two previous two posters. Copying to an MS-DOS formated disk may change the metadata associated to a file, but it should never corrupt the file itself.

To answer the question: OS X is not designed to corrupt files and file copies are all verified afaik. iPhoto also shouldn't corrupt files. In particular it should never even touch the "original" copy of an image, except for reading. It's way more likely that a hardware defect caused the file corruption. The harddrive you copied the files to is probably defective.

[Chuckit]

What TETENAL said.

[shifuimam]

That's what I was thinking. A good file system shouldn't corrupt files when going from one system to another. That being said, it's really annoying that I NEED to format a thumb drive as HFS+ to copy applications from OS 9 over to OS X. Perhaps I'm mistaken in this one, but in my experience, copying an app in OS 9 onto a FAT32 thumb drive and plugging it into a Mac running OS X results in OS X not realizing that it's an application.

But for OS-independent files, like images and plain text and whatnot, I see no reason why my images got corrupted. I'm a little concerned and want to know how to avoid this - e.g. should I always store my data in a FAT32 partition on a Mac to avoid data corruption when accessing said data from another operating system?

Edit: and in regards to what TETENAL said about my drive: it's a fairly new drive that I use on a regular basis for data backups and transfers. The only files on the drive that appear to have been corrupted in any way are these images that were copied from the iBook. I'm relatively certain that the drive itself isn't defective, but I'll be sure to run the appropriate disk tools app on it to ensure that there's no problems requiring an RMA on the drive.

[pheonixash]

Well I've had an external drive formatted as FAT32 which I've been using for a while, so I can assure you that OS X doesn't corrupt anything while transferring. Sure seems odd, maybe running the disk tools on both drives with give you a clue?

[analogika]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

it's really annoying that I NEED to format a thumb drive as HFS+ to copy applications from OS 9 over to OS X. Perhaps I'm mistaken in this one, but in my experience, copying an app in OS 9 onto a FAT32 thumb drive and plugging it into a Mac running OS X results in OS X not realizing that it's an application.

a) What's OS 9?

b) Workaround: Stuff it or zip it beforehand, and it'll work fine.

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

But for OS-independent files, like images and plain text and whatnot, I see no reason why my images got corrupted. I'm a little concerned and want to know how to avoid this - e.g. should I always store my data in a FAT32 partition on a Mac to avoid data corruption when accessing said data from another operating system?

"The Mac" as such doesn't corrupt data when transferring to a FAT32 partition. Period. Files with resource forks are split up, but the data fork will continue to work just fine as the "regular" file (obvious exception, as you know, being OS 9 applications, which keep their entire resource library in the resource fork).

Apart from that, working with a FAT32 partition is simply not a problem - unless something's broken.

It's not entirely unlikely that the iBook had a smacker - unreliable port, a gently manifesting logic board failure - these things happen on laptops.