Ask Slashdot: Practical Bitrot Detection For Backups? 321
An anonymous reader writes "There is a lot of advice about backing up data, but it seems to boil down to distributing it to several places (other local or network drives, off-site drives, in the cloud, etc.). We have hundreds of thousands of family pictures and videos we're trying to save using this advice. But in some sparse searching of our archives, we're seeing bitrot destroying our memories. With the quantity of data (~2 TB at present), it's not really practical for us to examine every one of these periodically so we can manually restore them from a different copy. We'd love it if the filesystem could detect this and try correcting first, and if it couldn't correct the problem, it could trigger the restoration. But that only seems to be an option for RAID type systems, where the drives are colocated. Is there a combination of tools that can automatically detect these failures and restore the data from other remote copies without us having to manually examine each image/video and restore them by hand? (It might also be reasonable to ask for the ability to detect a backup drive with enough errors that it needs replacing altogether.)"
Have mercy! (Score:5, Funny)
We have hundreds of thousands of family pictures and videos we're trying to save using this advice. But in some sparse searching of our archives, we're seeing bitrot destroying our memories. With the quantity of data (~2 TB at present),
As the proud owner of dozens of family photo albums, a stack of PhotoCDs etc which rarely see the light of day, the bigger challenge is whether anyone will ever voluntarily look at those terabytes of photos. Having been the victim of excruciating vacation slide shows that only consisted of 40-50 images on a number of occasions (not to mention the more modern version involving a phone/tablet waving in my face), I can only imagine the pain you could inflict on someone with the arsenal you are amassing.