Two OTs, Windows PC here. I pull my cards and do the OS update by connecting them to the PC with a card adapter. Never had corrupted projects/cards and never had any OS update issues. I take reasonable care with insert and removal. I have used the PC as a backup and transfer medium moving projects and sets between cards again with no issues.
The only thing I did was not use the stock cards that came with the OTs.
This isnāt just a Windows problem. I run OsX and Iāve had two projects become corrupted just this month (both in the same set) after a usb file transfer. Iāve also had one project have the āparse errorsā message in a different set.
With the most recent corruption my previously saved back up wouldnāt open either. Even after re transferring it via USB it had the same corrupt project message.
Eventually after much hand wringing and swearing I ended up erasing the entire set, making a new one and transferring the back up into the new set. It actually worked!
I always make sure to switch to a blank project when doing a USB transfer but now Iām going to try switching to a new set everytime since maybe this bug is actually on the set levelā¦
Did you manage to solve the problem? Ironically, I turned on the device to make a backup. Didnāt even connect to PC. And he gave me this error.
āThis project is either corrupt or saved with a newer version of the octstrack OS! Please upgrade to latest OSā.
The result of several years of work remained there. Copying the project to another location is the only thing Iāve tried so far. There is no result. Perhaps someone will have any ideas?
If I were you Iād open a ticket with support and stop using that card for now.
Partially managed to resolve the issue of restoring the project. So what has been done.
This, always.
I made a big faux pas yesterday, I intended to format a SD card using the SD formatting tool, I also had a USB thumb drive connected to the PC, for some reason the SD tool defaulted to the thumb drive rather than the SD card, I did not notice and ended up formatting the thumb drive, losing all the files 
Luckily I had backups. Moral of the story - shit happens, so back shit up.
And always make it on A DIFFERENT MEDIUM. Backing up your CF card on another solid state medium (a different CF or SD card, an SSD, a thumb drive) isnāt a good idea IMO, since itās subject to the same kinds of data loss (solid state storage in general isnāt really that good for long term storage since it needs to be powered up regularly or it will start to lose data integrity).
The bare minimum to be considered best practices for digital archiving (which isnāt really a thing - digital storage is just not going to be reliable no matter what), at least for years ago when I had some formal training in it, is three copies, three different types of media and two locations. So, say, the hard drive of your computer, a mechanical hard drive at your home, plus optical (DVD-R or something) stored at a relativeās home in a different city. Cloud storage isnāt really considered OK in most cases because itās subject to the TOS of the company that owns the servers, and you donāt ahve any control of that, but itās still a good idea as an extra failsafe on top of your three (or more) physical copies. So you could use something like Amazon Glacier where itās very inexpensive to store data but you have to pay a bit to access it again, assuming that you would only have to access it as a last resort if all of your physical backups were destroyed at the same time somehow. I havenāt looked into Glacier in quite a while but it ws something like $10 per gig per year last time I checked.
Because all of that that isnāt really practical for most people including me, I just try to at least make sure I have two copies on different hard drives PLUS a working copy (so for the Octatrack I back my files up to the hard drive of my PC and also to an external drive. For the PC I record on one internal drive, then copy the recordings to a second internal drive and an external drive and add new versions of my project files (plus any overdubs or new takes - just copy the whole folder over without replacing identical files) to the backups at the end of every session. It would still only take one fire to wipe out everything but thatās a lot less likely than one hard drive crash so itās an improvement.
Terrible. Perhaps it is worth making a copy of the binary image of the backup on tungsten plates. ))
The Library of Congress was subsidizing Ampex/Quantegy for something like a decade after they stopped being profitable in the 90s and 00s, because analog tape was the only recordable medium for audio that was archival. CDs and especially CD-Rs are fragile and degrade over time, DAT tape might as well be disposable, vinyl is really durable but canāt be recorded.
Digital storage is only reliable insofar as you can make a lot of redundant copies and replace them regularly. Iāve played 1/4" tapes that were literally buried in the dirt floor of a basement for 30-40 years with no boxes or anything and I didnāt even need to clean them (it was just recordings of job interviews for entry level warehouse work from the late 60s, unfortunately). You arenāt going to have that kind of luck with a hard drive.
Itās a real problem that just keeps getting worse, therevisnāt going to be much historical record of this century.