I have recently become interested in mini PCs, but one thing that is stopping me is a feeling that bit rot could cause me to lose data.

Is bit rot something to worry about when storing data for services such as Git, or Samba. I have another PC right now that is setup with btrfs raid1 and backups locally and to the cloud, however was thinking about downsizing for the benefit of size and power usage.

I know many people use the mini PCs such as ThinkCentres, Optiplex, EliteDesks and others, I am curious if I should be worried about losing data due to bit rot, or is bit rot a really rare occurrence?

Let’s say I have backups with a year of retention, wouldn’t it be possible that the data becomes corrupt and that it isn’t noticed until after a year? for example archived data that I don’t look at often but might need in the future.

  • synthsalad@mycelial.nexusEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Nightly automated runs of the chkbit script is the only thing that alerted me to the fact that either the SSD or storage controller in my Mac Mini had issues and was corrupting data. I was very thankful to have already had the automation in place for that exact scenario.

    It theoretically shouldn’t be necessary for filesystems that have built-in checksumming.

  • NullPointerException@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    honestly I don’t think it’s really a significant issue but if you’re worried just use a fs that can repair itself like zfs (not sure if btrfs can do that too but it might)

    • vividspecter@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      (not sure if btrfs can do that too but it might)

      It can. And they’ll both alert you of problems if you do regular scrubs, which might be enough even with non-raid installs, if you have secondary backups.

    • hedgehog@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      And if you’re really concerned about data integrity then you should also ensure that your server has ECC RAM.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

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