External USB disk frequent corruption at powerloss

[Goxgo]

I have an external USB hard drive attached to all of my several different VU+ cable and sat boxes to be able to easily move my recordings off the smaller (but faster) internal hard drives and also to free up space on the internal hard drives.

The problem is when there is a power loss, or the box hangs for whatever reason and needs a power off/on to start again, by doing this the external hard drive filesystem becomes corrupt and needs to be re-initialised and by doing this all recordings are of course lost.

I already have the boxes connected via UPSes but for longer power cuts they are not enough, nor do they help when a power off/on is needed when the box hangs.

I could of course disconnect the external USB disk and try to recover the file system on another computer with special software but for most of the year I am located in another country without physical access to the boxes so this is not a viable option.

Is there anyone out there who have had the same problem and solved it somehow?

I have already tried the built in disk tools but they are not able to fix the corruption but searching online do show one promising piece of software that the source code is available for and should be possible to run on the VU+ hardware but I am no programmer and there is no compiled version available for the VU+ hardware and I am not even sure if there is support for compiling with the standard OpenVix installation that I am using.

It would be great if someone could either compile a binary for this or even make ipk for this though assuming I am not the only one who struggles with corruption of USB disks.

The internal disks do not seem to have the same problem at all.

[cactikid]

I gave up using Passport hdd drives and will only use Externally powered ones.
I assume when you add your external drives you use the box to initialise it so they are in ext4 and ready to record.
I like yourself did start to run out of room and added a NAS to my home network to free up space. Only time i might need pc was to scan my network for a lost box ip that might have changed when network scan on box failed.

[Goxgo]

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I have tried both externally powered and passport drives but seem to have the same problem and yes, initialised by the box so if the boxes use ext4 then they are in ext4.
The problem I have with transferring files to the NAS for the moment is that my firewall looses the LAN net when transferring large amounts of big files, probably a problem with the realtek chip, I already have another firewall built with a Intel network chip that should solve that problem though, I just need to get there and swap the firewall out.

[birdman]

The box shouldn't hang in the first place, so I'd start looking at why it is.

Beyond that I'm surprised that you're regularly seeing corruption that can't be repaired by the Storage / Filesystem Check.
I seem to have developed a habit of knocking an external drive out of my laptop, but fsck (which is what the Filesystem Check runs) has never had a problem tidying things up. Although it's unlikely that there was much being written to it at the time.

Do you have timeshift enabled? If so, and it's writing to the external disk you could try writing it to the internal one instead.