I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?

To clarify,

  1. None of this is commercially important; I just don’t want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.

  2. Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.

  • Sneezycat
    5·
    6 months ago

    I want to point out that RAID doesn’t actively prevent bit rot and data degradation. You’ll want ZFS/RAIDZ for that.

    • criitz@reddthat.com
      3·
      6 months ago

      I’m not super familiar with ZFS/RAIDZ, I guess it does extra data scrubbing and stuff to prevent data issues?

      That’s cool. But a traditonal RAID setup still gives you redundancy and fault tolerance which is the important part, right?

      • Sneezycat
        5·
        6 months ago

        It’s a software RAID integrated in the filesystem, as I understand it. This video helped me understand it a bit more and it’s why I’m saying ZFS is a better idea. afaik you get the good parts of raid and some more. Obviously I have very superficial knowledge on all of this though, so I recommend doing your own reading :P