One Way To Save Digital Archives From File Corruption

storagedude points out this article about one of the perils of digital storage, the author of which "says massive digital archives are threatened by simple bit errors that can render whole files useless. The article notes that analog pictures and film can degrade and still be usable; why can't the same be true of digital files? The solution proposed by the author: two headers and error correction code (ECC) in every file."

Comments

par files

[ionix5891]

include par2 files

What about the "block errors"?

[MathFox]

Most of the storage media in common use (disks, tapes, CD/DVD-R) already do use ECC at sector of block level and will fix "single bit" errors at firmware level transparently. What is more of an issue at application level are "missing block" errors; when the low-level ECC fails and the storage device signals "unreadable sector" and one or more blocks of data are lost.

Off course this can be fixed by "block redundancy" (like RAID does), "block recovery checksums" or old-fashioned backups.

Also, Bittorrent

[NoPantsJim]

I remember reading a story of a guy who had to download a file from Apple that was over 4 gigabytes, and had to attempt it several times because each came back corrupted due to some problem with his internet. Eventually, he gave up and found the file on bit torrent, but realized if he saved it in the same location as the corrupted file, it would check the file and then overwrite it with the correct information. He was able to fix it in under an hour using bittorrent rather than trying to re-download the file while crossing his fingers and praying for no corruption.

I know it's not a perfect example, but just one way of looking at it.