[TriLUG] Bit rot detection without ZFS/btrfs?

[Francois Dion]

ZFS does the job. The licensing discussion is purely philosophical.

Francois

On Jun 30, 2013, at 20:42, "Randy Barlow" <randy at electronsweatshop.com> wrote:

> Hello fellow Linux people,
> 
> I've been wearing my tin foil hat a little bit too much lately, and I've started to become worried about all the files sitting on my various hard drives, bit rotting away.
> 
> I am aware that ZFS and btrfs are designed to help with this problem, but ZFS has its licensing issues, and btrfs isn't yet "blessed" by the Linux elders.
> 
> Do any of you use anything to detect file corruption on your disks? I'm mostly interested in detection at this point, as I think I can pretty well use my backups or off site backups to recover, but I need something to tell me when I need to do that.
> 
> I've considered writing something homegrown to do this, as it's not terribly complicated. I could store a checksum on the FS extended attributes, or maybe just in a database of some kind.
> 
> If anyone knows of a distro package that can do this, I'd love to hear about it. There are some interesting challenges to get past (lots of opportunities for false positives, for example when checksumming a file that is currently being written to by another process.)
> 
> -- 
> R
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