Quote:
Originally Posted by chemfire
I just don't buy into the entire bit rot thing being a real issue. ...
Really the *correct* way to solve this for regular people is backups, and more specifically versioned backups. If you run into a corrupt file you restore it from you backup going back as far as you have to find a sane copy. Really in all my years of using personal computers, I really have never encounter this issue on a fixed disk. ...
I think BTRFS could really actually help you here. ...
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That would be another way, but then I would need all that backup media and good organization. In case of hard drive failure or other accident I do keep extra copies on whatever spare hard drives I have on hand, other laptops, and to an online server (soon I'll try to add in tarsnap, but not sure how to avoid failing to keep the keys long term). But I admit I don't do it very well by sys admin standards, partly since that seems in tension with my intent to keep down how much hardware I use.
But suppose I did backup properly with a good amount of history. The data I mean to keep are pictures of my son. So the time frame is decades. If today I noticed a messed up picture what would revisiting the history look like? Possibly all the sata drives would have the error, so let's try the pata drives... oh dear, can I find a pata to sata adapter somewhere? My scheme feels simpler. 1. Redundancy to offline backups for when the disk dies. 2. Always maintain a second copy of important images across all current and future environments in case of bitrot. That I can maintain over time. A sys admin worthy backup scheme I'm bound to get lazy about doing properly.
I'm not that worried about bitrot, but it does seem like a real thing. I have seen at least one image file of my own with the problem shown in this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rot To be fair, I can't recall with certainty what medium it was on. Could well have been on a CDR.
Long term I won't use ZFS or btrfs, since OpenBSD won't support them, and who knows what operating systems I run later. I did take one backup of my pictures using a ZFS send, but I'm thinking normal copies to plain ext2 filesystems is a surer bet. Maybe when I'm 64 I'll dig out an old drive and be puzzled about how to read it: "oh right, I was messing around with ZFS and BTRFS back in the early 2020s. Darn it! Don't suppose plan9 has a driver for that."