Western Digital External HD and Time Machine issues

Question

I have been using my 500 Gb Western Digital Passport drive for the past few months, though I purchased it almost a year ago. I had been using it as a back up drive using Time Machine, though I also put other files on it at times. Recently it had been having issues backing up, and now it hasn't been recognized by my Mac. It hasn't had this problem before and when I tried to repair it, I received this message:
Verify and Repair volume “disk1s2”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
I'm worried that I won't be able to retrieve the data. I also don't want to reformat the drive if I have any other options. Please let me know what I can do, thank you.
(I'm also pretty sure that my drive is pretty much a goner and that I won't be able to retrieve my data).

Answer 1

ReiNocturna wrote:
Thank you, I'd seen some things about Disk Warrior and wasn't sure. I'll have to scrape money together I suppose.
Here is an image of the issue I encountered: Problem.
Yes, +*Invalid B-tree node size+* is one Disk Utility usually can't fix, but Disk Warrior often can.
Disk Utility can detect it, but not Finder, so I guess I've got no hope unless I use Disk Warrior, and even then it's only a possibility.
And so if I end up having to reformat the drive, I should probably use a different external for back-ups?
Depends. If these are your only backups, that's safest. If you have secondary backups (see below), I'd be inclined to give it another chance.
Any brands you recommend? (I'm getting tired of all these externals dying out on me, but then, technology does that sometimes. ;))
A lot of folks say WD's are junk (including those at CarbonCopyCloner), and we do see a lot of reports here, but they also sell a lot of them, so it's hard to tell whether they really fail more often than other makes. But other folks say they've used them for years without undue problems.
I've got a Seagate about 18 months old, and a LaCie Rugged (portable) about 6 months old; OWC and Iomega also seem to get good reviews.
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I've learned over the years (mostly the hard way, of course ), never to trust my backups to a single app or piece of hardware: no app is perfect, and all hardware fails, sooner or later.
Like many here, I keep both full Time Machine backups, plus a "bootable clone" on a separate external HD. I use CarbonCopyCloner, many use the similar SuperDuper. That gives me the best of both types of backups, plus of course a completely separate, independent backup.
CCC is donationware; SD has a free version, but you need the paid one (about $30) to do updates instead of full replacements, or scheduling. Either is easily found via Google.
And/or, see Kappy's post on Basic Backup, complete with links to the web sites of each product.