I lost a bunch of files again. Does anyone have tips?(deleted at
Note: At 5:04, the "feetImages" folder definitely looks sketchy, but it's just the history of the fastest Rubik's Cube solves performed with feet, which became this video: • The history of the fastest "With Feet" Rub...
The summary: Since 2011, I have used Processing (Java sketchbook) to generate videos (animated bar graphs, timers, Conway's Game of Life, 3D cityscapes, etc.) From 2011-20, I would have Processing generate image sequences (one image per frame) for these videos. But that means that a 5-minute 60-fps video requires 18,000 image files to be rendered. Each is small (maybe 20 KB), but that adds up, and file overhead means those folders are slow to copy and backup (e.g. with Backblaze). In 2020, YoyleSpartan taught me about Hamoid's Video Exporter, which allows Processing to export directly to video, and ever since then, I've exclusively used it to generate videos. No more image sequences.
Anyway, in my time in 2011-20, I probably made hundreds of image sequences, ranging from 100 images to 60,000 at the max. That is why there are 3.7 million files on my drive. This has caused problems, like Backblaze struggling to back it all up. So a month ago, I came up with the idea of writing a Python script that searches for image sequences, and converts them into .mp4's as seamlessly as possible! 20,000 .pngs to 1 .mp4 saves a ton of space and filecount. Here's the GitHub repo of my code for that: https://github.com/carykh/compress_im...
I ran this code successfully on 100+ image sequences, and I was able to shrink my backup by at least 500,000 files (and also 100 GB? Not sure about that) It was working fine and dandy for an entire day, but then I noticed that the command prompt would claim that "XYZ/ABC folder is corrupted and can't be opened." That would strike me as odd, because I could open the folder and access the files just fine in Windows File Explorer. So, I Googled the error message and found this video ( • How to Fix DISM Error 1392 on Windows 10 [... ), which recommended running "chkdsk /offlinescanandfix". After about 30 seconds, I noticed it produce hundreds of messages like "Deleting index entry College_thing.txt in index $I30". Concerned, I looked in File Explorer, and sure enough, all folders labeled A-P in the Documents folder of my 2011-17 backup were gone! Interestingly, folders labeled P-Z were still there, untouched as far as I can tell.
That's the gist of it. Questions: Is chkdsk known for deleting files super quickly like that? Was I silly for running my image-sequence-compression Python code so willy-nilly all over my drive? Do we think that's what's to blame for the folder corruption? How do folders and files get corrupted anyway, and what's the safest way to remove/de-corrupt them?
I don't expect anyone to have all the answers, but any discussion will help. Thanks for reading this far into it!