Re: Protecting audio files from bit rot?
Reply #16 – 2016-05-28 16:19:58
What a load of audiofail BS. "Bit rot" *facepalm* . There is nothing specific between you audio files and other data you dont need to safeguard it in any special way. all the same methods apply Backup Data verification chekcsum/hash Error recovery You might want to look into .par files I never said there was a difference between audio files or other data like pictures. I mention audio files because this is a forum dedicated to music... In my music library I have found audio files that have been damaged in different ways by bit rot, but have replaced most. You don't know it happens because it's silent corruption. You won't know if you have a bad copy of a song or an album if your computer automatically backups your music library to a hard drive. I am curious what your method is. I don't think I've ever seen an audio file damaged by bit rot. You'd have to be fairly unlucky to have an audible difference, or have a hard drive that was rapidly failing. I remembered when I was still using Windows XP, there were really some audio and video files in my harddrive getting noticeably corrupted, but I suspect I could have ignored those error like some of the chkdsk reports or lost clusters due to power failure or unexpected reboots. Couldn't remember if the disk/partition was using FAT32 or NTFS though. Never happened again since I upgraded to Windows 7. In case of CDR data corruption the drive will simply retry and spin like crazy and throw a CRC error. A good thing about audio file format with internal checksum support is the checksum will not be affected by metadata so updating tags will not change the checksum. However it seems that checksum is not popular among lossy formats, but at least wavpack supports it. Things go wrong with computers. When things go wrong with hard disks, it can cost us our data. If that data is primarilly music, well... it's music. That is not saying that there is anything special about data files that happen to contain music. We, the end users, are not necessarily expected to know and use the precisely correct technical terms. FWIW, I've never been disappointed (so far) by using separate audio drives and/or partitions, thus keeping audio data apart from the system drive. What, in case spreadsheet data starts leaking numbers into the audio? It might make sense to keep filesystems that regularly have data added to them, but relatively rarely have it deleted or moved around. I don't have any justification for that: it is intuitive, which means I could easily by BSing! I have had one audio file that went bad, in that it was playable from end to end, but the sound was heavily distorted. I never found out how that happened, or if (quite probable) it was something that I did. Fast-failing hard disks are all too common. What I suspect is that it starts as slow failure, nothing that the system cannot handle, and thus is not noticed. Then it escalates and data becomes unreadable. Any hard disk that starts to make odd noises or give errors should be replaced urgently.