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Easy backup solution to protect against bit rot (or verify)

7 votes
4 answers
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I'm looking for an easy solution to protect against random bit flips (so-called bit rot) of data stored on various drives. They are not disk *arrays*, just single disks, that I backup once a week. So I'm not looking for *redundancy*, but for *file integrity* -- i.e. I want to know if my files that I haven't accessed in a long time got randomly damaged or not, and hopefully repair them if possible. Please note that I want a generic solution, I'm specifically *not* looking for a filesystem like ZFS or btrfs (which I'm already aware of), partly because they have way too much overhead just for checksumming, and they're too complex / unstable (btrfs case). It doesn't have to be an *automatic* thing. That is, if I have to run a command to generate checksums (and maybe recovery) for new written files, that's fine, but it should be simple to use, not something like manually storing checksums and verifying and then copying the bad files back etc (which I'm doing already, that's why I ask for something simpler, less manual). At a glance, SnapRAID seems to do what I want, except it's made for disk arrays, which is my problem. I *think* that it could work with just 1 data disk and 1 parity disk, in which case the parity disk will probably be a *mirror* (backup) of the data disk, but I'm not sure. Other than that it does what I need: checksumming files, ability to verify this, and even repair them from the backup (parity). I'll *still* run a weekly backup on external media, but this local backup needs to be less manual because it's starting to be a pain to manage. Are there other tools like SnapRAID which are made for just 1 data disk or filesystem that they protect with automatic checksumming/backup, or should I just use SnapRAID? Does it work fine with just 1 disk? Because it uses a *parity disk* for the backup, I'll have to completely wipe my local backup disk before using it with SnapRAID, so I'm hesitant to just "test" it for myself without confirmation. One downside to this is that the parity disk will not be accessible as a normal disk, even though in this case it's not *really* a parity disk but just a mirror. So if there's another similar easy-to-use tool for dealing with just backing up **and integrity of files** of 1 disk instead of a disk array, I'd like to know. Thanks.
Asked by kktsuri (335 rep)
May 21, 2018, 12:33 PM
Last activity: Nov 22, 2022, 07:57 PM