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Am 08.01.2013 00:20, schrieb Alan McKinnon: |
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> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:11:35 +0100 |
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> Florian Philipp <lists@×××××××××××.net> wrote: |
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> |
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>> Hi list! |
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>> |
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>> I have a use case where I am seriously concerned about bit rot [1] |
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>> and I thought it might be a good idea to start looking for it in my |
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>> own private stuff, too. |
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[...] |
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>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot |
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>> |
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>> Regards, |
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>> Florian Philipp |
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>> |
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> |
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> You are using a very peculiar definition of bitrot. |
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> |
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> "bits" do not "rot", they are not apples in a barrel. Bitrot usually |
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> refers to code that goes unmaintained and no longer works in the system |
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> it was installed. What definition are you using? |
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> |
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That's why I referred to wikipedia, not the jargon file ;-) |
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The definition that I thought about was decay of storage media, |
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especially hard disks. I'm not aware of another commonly used name for |
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that effect. Disk rot seems to apply only to optical media. |
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> If you mean crummy code that goes unmaintained, then keep systems up to |
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> date and report bugs. |
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> |
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> If you mean disk file corruption, then doing it file by file is a |
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> colossal waste of time IMNSHO. You likely have >1,000,000 files. Are |
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> you really going to md5sum each one daily? Really? |
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> |
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Well, not daily but often enough that I likely still have a valid copy |
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as a backup. |
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> This is a filesystem task, not a cronjab task. Use a filesystem that |
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> does proper checksumming. ZFS does it, but that is of course somewhat |
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> problematic on Linux. Check out the others, it will be something modern |
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> you need, like ext4 maybe or btrfs |
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> |
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AFAIK, ext4 only has checksums for its metadata. Even if the file system |
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would support appropriate checksums out-of-the-box, I'd still need a |
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tool to regularly read files and report on errors. |
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As I said above, the point is that I need to detect the error as long as |
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I still have a valid backup. Professional archive solutions do this on |
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their own but I'm looking for something suitable for desktop usage. |
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Regards, |
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Florian Philipp |
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