Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive error from SMART

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Am Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 06:01:11PM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> > The advantage of an integrity scheme (like ZFS or comparing with a checksum
> > file) over your rsync approach is that you only need to read all the datas™
> > from one drive instead of two. Plus: if rsync actually detects a change, it
> > doesn’t know which of the two drives introduced the error. You need to find
> > out yourself after the fact (which probably won’t be hard, but still, it’s
> > one more manual step).
>
> In this case, if something had changed, I'd have no problem manually
> checking the file to be sure which was good and which was bad.

Consider a big video file, which I know you like to accumulate from youtube
and the likes. How do you find out the broken one? By watching it and trying
to find the one image or audio frame that is garbled? The drive might return
zeros or other garbage (bit flip) instead of actual content without SMART
noticing it (uncorrectable error).

> Given
> the error is recent on my drive, I'd suspect the backups to still be a
> good file.  For that reason, I'd suspect the backup file to be good
> therefore not to be overwritten.  I was trying to avoid a bad file
> replacing a good file on the backup which then destroys all good files
> and leaves only bad ones.  This is why I like that SMART at least let me
> know there is a problem. 

I also tend to rely on smart, but it’s not all-knowing and probably not
infallible.

> Sometimes things has to be done manually which is often the best way. 
> Just depends on the situation I guess. 

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