Question File System corruption after sudden black out

[ccccarl]

A massive thunder storm blew threw my area in the middle of the night. Got out of bed immediately to go shut down my PC and unplug it from the socket, just in case, but at the exact moment it started waking up from sleep, the power dropped and started fluctuating rapidly. So I decided to just hit the psu switch, uplug it and deal with the situation the next day.

Booted my PC in the morning and it actually booted up perfectly fine, as if it were actually waking from sleep. All my browser tabs and previous software was immediately up and running but then I got an error message saying that there was corruption the file system and it was prompting me to reboot my PC to repair it.

So I did. It went through its repair process, restarted and put me back into windows.

I just want to know if I'm 'safe' now. Did windows successfully manage to clean up the corruption or is my install now a ticking time bomb? I've been using my PC for a few hours now and it seems perfectly fine, all my files are there and no software is crashing or anything like that. No BSODs yes. Are there any more steps I can take to make sure my system is 100% in the clear? I ran the sfc /scannow command and it found no errors so that feels like a good sign, but I've legitimately never dealt with corruption. I've had countless PCs lose power at random times but this is the first time I've actually been prompted to do a file system repair.

 

[USAFRet]

Is it all running OK?
If so, no problem.

But this is where a real backup situation is indicated.

If your system and software was corrupted, recover from the backup.

 

[ccccarl]

Is it all running OK?
If so, no problem.

But this is where a real backup situation is indicated.

If your system and software was corrupted, recover from the backup.

Yep, everything seems to be running perfectly fine. No weirdness, no corrupted or missing files that I can see. I just thought I'd ask in case there was anything else I needed to do to give my system the all clear.

I've actually been backing up a lot of my data all day hah. I'm way too lazy when it comes to backups but this felt like a big wake up call.

 

[ubuysa]

It really depends on what the filesystem corruption was. If all seems well then it probably is.

For the future I'd advise two things...

a) A regular backup strategy (I backup automatically every night).

b) Get a UPS. Here on the Greek island of Crete we also get thunderstorms, and my UPS (which powers the PC, the main monitor, the router, and the backup drive) means that power flicks or short outages don't worry me at all. The PSU will also shutdown the PC properly during a long outage, when there is only 10 minutes running time left in the UPS batteries.