Now that's interesting, not to mention a bit frightening. But what are my options? Should I uncheck the box in my backup software that says "Replicate Folder and File Deletions?"? I don't think that would work for me because my source drive is not static data storage. There are folders being moved from one directory to another every time I load my iPod, and folders in the "iPOD PENDING" directory are duplicated in the "HEARD" directory until I am done with them on the iPod, at which point they are deleted. My backup drive would fill up pretty fast under those circumstances. I guess I could uncheck the box until the drive filled up, then uncheck it one time for the next backup, but there would be no easy way to determine whether the source drive was indeed missing any folders/files.

If it were just the 15 Michael Connelly books that turned up missing, I could convince myself that I had somehow deleted that directory by mistake. But I know I didn't make that mistake 26 different times on 26 different authors!

As regards the "...9 folders and 78 files gone already.", it is worse than that, since in the past two months I have added at least 18 folders and 200 files to that drive. No, wait, those new files are being held on a different drive pending additional processing.

I don't think (but can't be totally sure) that any single files have disappeared, it seems as though it is always an entire folder full of files that is missing. There is no apparent pattern to the deletions, some of the missing data was relatively new, some was years old. I did note that alphabetically 39 of the 41 missing folder names started with the first five letters of the alphabet.

I'll just start comparing my drive contents to my Excel index file a bit more often. It is a BIG job (hours of tedium) to do that, but I'll work on simplifying/automating it somewhat.

tanstaafl.