Anyone know what causes intermittent corruption of random visual media files across drives and machines?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/DataHoarder

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • ccheck

    Simple, easy to use, minimal consistency checker (hasher) for file archives.

  • Grab a friends computer and amass a large batch of good known files, make sure they are of all different file formats. I am pretty sure you will be able to find entire archives of test data in different formats online, to really reproduce this I am going to assume it should be multiple gb in size. Make sure it contains jpg, videos, text files, pdfs, etc. Now write a script or use some tool like this (https://github.com/jwr/ccheck) to basically compute the sha256 checksum of every file in this test package and write it to a file. Take this package of files and copy them to as many media sources as you have access to, CD/DVDs are great, thumb drive, your laptop, a nas with ZFS (and ECC ram) would be amazing, probably throw it up on cloud storage just to be safe. I would then have the same script run as a cron job, maybe on your main machine to basically continuously check that checksums match their original value. As soon as you notice a checksum mismatch you will want to isolate that file and locate the same one across all the other systems and do a deeper inspection. Open it up in a HEX editor and do a bit by bit comparison to see were the corruption occurred and how bad it is. This will start to give you a better picture of what may be going on.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts