More jpg file corruption

Question

I've had another jpg file corrupted in the same manner as before and this time the file hasn't been touched recently by anything but LR. My second copy was also corrupt because I "back up" too often. Fortunately, it's easy for me to get files back from my internet backup, which is written only once. To get to my CDs or DVDs would require digging in a closet.
To me this brings a lot of issues to the fore with jpg handling, both what I do with them and what LR does with them. First, if you are going to rewrite files frequently (I only write metadata on demand, not automatically) then you have to know how to do it safely! On my side, it may be stupid to write it out -- nope, not, because I have to in order to edit in PS and retain the metadata. I have almost innumerable LR backups and the metadata is in there. I have considerable experience now in plopping in an absolute original file and LR happily applies everything to it. Hum. I'm forgetting the PS edits which would not be backed up with this plan.
The existence of 1 to 1 previews makes it very slow to SEE a problem in LR. I haven't used these files for months until the 9th when I started working on them. The first day or so it was grinding a lot, obviously making previews. So the good preview of this file had to be made on the 9th or a bit after so the file was OK at that time. In fact, everything looked fine until I decided to edit a copy of the file in PS. It stumbled and flickered the screen and then created a preview with only the top third or so of the file intact and the bottom part "faded." These appear to still be (almost) valid jpg file, but the content has been damaged.
I have used jpg files for years and I don't remember a time when I've had jpg file corruption. I may have forgotten an instance, but it doesn't come to mind. I've had 3 or 4 them now with LR.
These jpg files were created from scans and I have manipulated them to put the capture date, date digitized, and some global type information. I use exifer, a product that's been used for many years by many people (and not updated recently). If exifer is a problem, why only a handful of corruptions in thousands of files?
It's difficult to have a sensible backup plan except to keep the originals somewhere really safe. Even with metadata writing turned off by default, these files churn. I cannot keep every version of jpg files. And keeping the old files for a short period does not help because bad files don't show up in LR under many circumstances because of the preview files.
I don't know if this is relevant but I never had this happen with LR 1.0.
This is very worrisome and I'm going to get grouchy soon! You guys with RAW are really lucky that LR doesn't write to your files! I'd now love to have an option of a sidecar file which I could write to the jpg only when I'm ready to and have a way to check that the resulting file is still intact.
Of course I haven't proven there isn't an issue with my disk drive, but I've now proven it to myself that there's a very high probability that LR is corrupting jpg files when writing out metadata. I would like to hear if others using jpg files have had corruptions.

Answer 1

Hi, I too also have just experienced jpg corruption. It was a jpg that had been taken several years ago and had not been edited at all. The bottom left hand corner had been transposed from the right hand side. The result of this was the whole bottom 1/5 of the picture was shifted to the right. Also the color of the shifted portion was slightly different from the rest. This is the first jpg corruption in Lightroom I have seen. My backup was the same but fortunately I had a copy on DVD. I am using Windows version of Lightroom 1.2, tried 1.3 and decided to go back to 1.2
Does anyone know if this type of corruption only happens to jpg files. Would it be worthwhile marking them all read-only. I plan to check my other jpgs to see if there are any more corruptions. I mainly shoot RAW now and convert to DNG