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Message-ID: <50EBCA77.8030603@binarywings.net>
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:27:51 +0100
From: Florian Philipp <lists@binarywings.net>
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Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] OT: Fighting bit rot
References: <50EB2BF7.4040109@binarywings.net> <20130108012016.2f02c68c@khamul.example.com>
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Am 08.01.2013 00:20, schrieb Alan McKinnon:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:11:35 +0100
> Florian Philipp <lists@binarywings.net> wrote:
>=20
>> Hi list!
>>
>> I have a use case where I am seriously concerned about bit rot [1]
>> and I thought it might be a good idea to start looking for it in my
>> own private stuff, too.
[...]
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot
>>
>> Regards,
>> Florian Philipp
>>
>=20
> You are using a very peculiar definition of bitrot.
>=20
> "bits" do not "rot", they are not apples in a barrel. Bitrot usually
> refers to code that goes unmaintained and no longer works in the system=

> it was installed. What definition are you using?
>=20

That's why I referred to wikipedia, not the jargon file ;-)

The definition that I thought about was decay of storage media,
especially hard disks. I'm not aware of another commonly used name for
that effect. Disk rot seems to apply only to optical media.

> If you mean crummy code that goes unmaintained, then keep systems up to=

> date and report bugs.
>=20
> If you mean disk file corruption, then doing it file by file is a
> colossal waste of time IMNSHO. You likely have >1,000,000 files. Are
> you really going to md5sum each one daily? Really?
>=20

Well, not daily but often enough that I likely still have a valid copy
as a backup.

> This is a filesystem task, not a cronjab task. Use a filesystem that
> does proper checksumming. ZFS does it, but that is of course somewhat
> problematic on Linux. Check out the others, it will be something modern=

> you need, like ext4 maybe or btrfs
>=20

AFAIK, ext4 only has checksums for its metadata. Even if the file system
would support appropriate checksums out-of-the-box, I'd still need a
tool to regularly read files and report on errors.

As I said above, the point is that I need to detect the error as long as
I still have a valid backup. Professional archive solutions do this on
their own but I'm looking for something suitable for desktop usage.

Regards,
Florian Philipp



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