M
Martin_Libiak
Guest
Hello, I would like to ask you for help.
Every 2-4 weeks I do backup of all my personal files from my PC to an external HDD. All the files and directories on the HDD are duplicates of those on the PC (so I have everything twice) and I do the backup by syncing the HDD according to the PC (I have got an app for that.)
Since March I have been disconnecting ethernet from the PC everytime I plug the HDD in.
When I came to check one of the directories on the HDD, I found many files that have never been there before. They all have weird names with special characters and around 1 GB in size:
These are properties of one of them (notice 0 bytes)
On the HDD, this thing happened in this single folder only.
This is what the same directory looks like on my PC and what it should look like on the HDD as well:
When I tried to delete the entire directory, which contains these weird files, nothing got deleted, no error message displayed. When I tried to delete one of those weird files, nothing happened again. When I tried to delete one of my personal files that were there originally, it got deleted in standard way.
So what could this be please? Could it be a virus that could damage files on my PC as well? (I have always had Avast antivirus installed on my PC.) Or is it that the HDD just got broken somehow? Thank you for your replies.
PS. I am currently running a deep virus scan of my entire PC. I think I should not use the HDD anymore and rather buy a new one.
More...
Every 2-4 weeks I do backup of all my personal files from my PC to an external HDD. All the files and directories on the HDD are duplicates of those on the PC (so I have everything twice) and I do the backup by syncing the HDD according to the PC (I have got an app for that.)
Since March I have been disconnecting ethernet from the PC everytime I plug the HDD in.
When I came to check one of the directories on the HDD, I found many files that have never been there before. They all have weird names with special characters and around 1 GB in size:
These are properties of one of them (notice 0 bytes)
On the HDD, this thing happened in this single folder only.
This is what the same directory looks like on my PC and what it should look like on the HDD as well:
When I tried to delete the entire directory, which contains these weird files, nothing got deleted, no error message displayed. When I tried to delete one of those weird files, nothing happened again. When I tried to delete one of my personal files that were there originally, it got deleted in standard way.
So what could this be please? Could it be a virus that could damage files on my PC as well? (I have always had Avast antivirus installed on my PC.) Or is it that the HDD just got broken somehow? Thank you for your replies.
PS. I am currently running a deep virus scan of my entire PC. I think I should not use the HDD anymore and rather buy a new one.
More...