Selfhosted

40218 readers

956 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is bit rot really a threat that I should worry about? (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have recently become interested in mini PCs, but one thing that is stopping me is a feeling that bit rot could cause me to lose data.

Is bit rot something to worry about when storing data for services such as Git, or Samba. I have another PC right now that is setup with btrfs raid1 and backups locally and to the cloud, however was thinking about downsizing for the benefit of size and power usage.

I know many people use the mini PCs such as ThinkCentres, Optiplex, EliteDesks and others, I am curious if I should be worried about losing data due to bit rot, or is bit rot a really rare occurrence?

Let's say I have backups with a year of retention, wouldn't it be possible that the data becomes corrupt and that it isn't noticed until after a year? for example archived data that I don't look at often but might need in the future.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nightly automated runs of the chkbit script is the only thing that alerted me to the fact that either the SSD or storage controller in my Mac Mini had issues and was corrupting data. I was very thankful to have already had the automation in place for that exact scenario.

It theoretically shouldn’t be necessary for filesystems that have built-in checksumming.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you post your scripts?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is what I use, will work with any filesystem (it writes hashes in hidden/dot files) and on any OS as long as Python is available: https://pypi.org/project/chkbit/

It runs ahead of my nightly backup. If it fails, the backup won’t proceed.

Edit: Because the script relies on hashing files, it uses tons of both disk IO and CPU when it runs, but the tradeoff is worthwhile to me.