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.
How life-or-death critical would it be if you lost one of those files?
Resilient filesystems/raid/multiple backup points should be more than enough.
A word of caution on relying on backups without the other types of error prevention you mention: If it takes you a while to notice that bitrot has ruined a file, then it may have already propagated through your backups. The only type of backups that would account for this is archival backups, such as on tape or quality bluray discs.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I expected and I am now thinking of keeping my setup how it is currently and getting a mini PC for less important data and services to tinker with.
That is a very good question, it makes me think of better organization for my data. Data such as task lists, and daily notes aren’t necessarily very important, while family photos and documents would be more important.
For any family photos and documents you can’t afford to lose, make sure you have backups of it. A RAID array does not mean you don’t need backups: you want at least 3 copies, at least one offsite.
The copy in your RAID array is one copy. You can back that up to an external hard drive or something as a second copy. Then have an offsite backup on something like Backblaze as your third copy.
Thanks for the reassurance. What I currently have is exactly that, RAID for the local data, and a spare drive that is mounted and unmount when data is backed up, and that is rsynced offsite to a cloud provider. I figured that my current setup was really reliable as I had slowly been researching and working on this over a few years.
I have a sort of itch to play with a mini PC, I guess it would be best not to hurt any of my important data by downgrading the setup, however this is a good time to really sort and figure out what I need and is important and what isn’t as important and can be reobtained if something fails on the mini PC.
Save yourself a headache and use btrfs/zfs with periodically checks as suggested in another post.
Who cares if it is a problem or not when it has a simple and inexpensive solution.