Re: Protecting audio files from bit rot?
Reply #70 – 2016-06-10 15:25:44
The relevance of this problem can be estimated by looking at the number of times a stored program that has always worked well suddenly starts totally failing and crashing do ng the identical same things that used to work well, without an accompanying error message pointing out the media errors that caused it. Back in the day when I worked with people who worked with PCs, that was all part of the Windows experience! Microsoft set the computer-using bar very low, and people got used to stuff like having to reboot, re-install programs and even reload the operating system on a regular basis. All this while the Unix machines in the server room just went on and on ...and on ...and on. NB... My experience of Windows ended at XP. If it has improved, in the several versions since then, well good. About time too. The odds of failure of the same data on two different disks going bad are fantastically high.The odds of failure of the same data on two different disks going bad are fantastically high. They point to a failure of a common component which could be software. Or a disk controller or... anything. Technically, as users, all we need to know is that our systems are not perfect, and that hard disks are mortal, and that, if we do not have adequate backups, we run the risk of loosing our data. The odds of that happening are not high: it is a lucky person that does not experience one or more hard disk failures in their computing life. Actually, never mind the hardware... it is a lucky person that never gets that ohmygodwhathaveIdone feeling after a delete command. The rest is academic. But rot in music files? Yes, probably mythical. in about 15 years of regularly listening to music from a computer, I have (as I think I mentioned before) had one file that "went bad." It played, but horribly distorted. The backup was fine, and it was far more likely to have been user error (me: but no idea how) than bit rot) because a data error on disk would surely be more likely to cause drop outs or an unplayable file, not one that had the same fault from beginning to end. I don't even have a count of the hard disks I've lost in that time.