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,
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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.
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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.
Instead of a single external HD set up a NAS with a raid configuration so that even if a drive fails the data is safe.
I want to point out that RAID doesn’t actively prevent bit rot and data degradation. You’ll want ZFS/RAIDZ for that.
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?
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This video
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