Disk drive integrity

I have a 1TB disk drive that is showing a fair number of corrupted documents. Now I have backups that appear to be intact so there's no panic but I do have the hassle of merging my backups with my updated documents. My question is, how do you detect data corruption when the hardware is not reporting any errors? What strategy do you use, if any. Ideally, I would like to be notified as soon as possible that files have become corrupt. What is the best way to do it?

If no disk errors are reported it suggests that data is being correctly recorded to disk. That would suggest that a rogue program is corrupting the document in memory.

Any other symptoms?

There are no other symptoms. It seems to be just office documents and images. I had thought of a virus although I've had no infections reported. My question still stands, though. How can I detect such corruptions?

All I can suggest is that you compare the backups with the current documents and investigate any differences.

That is what I must do pro tem. I'm thinking about a more robust strategy. Routine automated file comparisons are an obvious option. Aside from the hassle of restoring damaged files, the main risk is in overwriting good backups with corrupted files.

Assuming you do have other backups, and it's not a system drive, I would start with a fixmbr, then a full format. Then if it's still doing it and there's nothing reported, such as bad clusters, I would suspect the source of the data which would be the software if it's localised, or perhaps a bad drive controller if said drive is on its own on that controller. In fact, it could be any number of hardware issues, but you should see patterns, and if they're specific to the drive (but not the controller) it's most likely the MBR or a software issue on the drive (virus / bad driver / no idea! ).

I'm not worried about that particular drive or the cause of the errors. What I'm thinking about is a way to detect such corruptions in the future with minimal effort on my part.