Okay, finally had some time to dismantle the machine in question and
inserted the backup drive without the enclosure. Now that I was able to get
smartctl to give me information on what was going on, it seems there's
nothing wrong with the drive itself (no remapped sectors, nothing prefail or
fail going wrong, drive's smart status is good) but it's had a history of
406 (!!!) errors reported, the last five happening within the same second,
all of which seem (to my untrained eye) to imply a bad IDE cable. Which
means likely my USB enclosure is screwing up.

	To be sure, I did some extended testing with it hooked up: Tried
doing a full and incremental backup of my machine with no errors reported,
as well as an offline and then immediately afterwards, long test via
smartctl. Nothing changed in the output.

	I've attached the output of smartctl at various points in the tests:
the first being the initial immediate display of information at startup, the
second just after the long test, and the third just after the two backups
(Full and incremental) were tried. Nothing seems to shout at me in the
output, I'm frankly pretty sure something's wrong with the enclosure. If
it's the drive, it's not showing up here at least.

	I'd like your thoughts and suggestions on this. While I'm pretty
sure I know what the smartctl output means, I'm always capable of being
entirely wrong. Please let me know if I've misinterpreted the information.

Timothy McGrath