Asklemmy

43899 readers

1029 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Best way to backup files (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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,

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.
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.

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I also just do this. However I have already found 2 photos that got randomly corrupted, and I don't know how to prevent that.

So far my only idea was using md5sum, but checking all files like that takes a loooooooooong time.

I am paranoid about cloud. I do have my music backed up on OneDrive, encrypted with GPG using AES256, but I don't even fully trust that. I know, it sounds stupid, but maybe in the future it will be quite easy to break.

But I don't know much about encryption. Just reading the man page, I put these options together:

--s2k-cipher-algo AES256 --s2k-digest-algo SHA512 --s2k-mode 3 --s2k-count 65011712

but whether I can consider that safe enough, I don't know.

And since I don't know enough about it, I prefer not to trust it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I also just do this. However I have already found 2 photos that got randomly corrupted, and I don't know how to prevent that.

If you are fine with changing your file system, check out zfs. It stores checksums with your data, and can, if configured to store multiple copies, repair corruption.