Bridge has started to destroy our JPEGs; known problem?

Question

Hi,
half an hour ago something - possibly Bridge - has obviously started to destroy our JPEGs. We first noticed strange artefacts in the Bridge previews; then we were shocked when we discovered that the files themselves were altered (without changing the modification date of the file). We checked this by connecting the external drive that contains the files to another computer: It's not a problem with the previews, the files themselves are destroyed. (On this other computer GIMP gives the error "Corrupt JPEG data: 3841 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd9" when opening the file I've attached to this post.)
Fortunately the NEF files are unaltered. A check of the hard drive shows no problems.
We're not 100% shure that Bridge is causing this - but since Bridge was the only program open at the time and since the problem developed while using Bridge it seems very probable to us that Bridge is involved in this phenomenon.
Did you observe anything similar? Is this a known problem? We didn't find anything when searching Google or this forum.
Thanks for your help!
(We're using Adobe Bridge CS5 4.0.5.11 on an iMac with Mac OS X 10.7.5)

Answer 1

- mainly (only? I don't know exactly) files are affected where we added metadata;
The clue about no change in modification date in the first post would mean you did not alter the files. However this changes things because you seem to have done so.
In normal use while adding metadata or rename the file needs to be saved again to apply the changes. While doing so Bridge updates the thumbs and previews to reflect the new situation.
If this save action would be the cause of the destroyed jpegs they should have shown so immediate after applying the changes. But yes, we all are in a hurry and have a short memory
If you have pointed Bridge to another folder while the save was still in progress then you would not notice it but also the cache is not likely to rebuild until you point Bridge again to the folder.
The moment you point Bridge to that folder first the thumb rebuilds and then the preview to reflect the changes. Because the modification date did not change to the date you saw the changes happening it is likely the problem has been caused before but you have not noticed earlier until you pointed Bridge to this folder which started the recaching of the files (only modification of the cache file, not the original jpeg) to reflect the new situation.
Don't use Gimp myself but a jpeg is a jpeg and an international standard so they both should be able to read and write correct files.
Therefor it stays a strange problem and you should back up your files frequently in case this starts happen again. If it is a one off we keep wondering what it might have been but if it repeats I would first suspect the disk (running a health scan is not always pointing to other problems like correct read write permissions and also folders can get corrupted for strange reasons).
BTW, I never have been a fan of RAID, to expensive and to much space needed. A simple back up scheme with different disks has always done the trick for me.