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.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•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.