On 4/8/24 02:38, Marc SCHAEFER wrote:
For offline storage:
On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 05:53:15AM -0700, David Christensen wrote:
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions regarding how to use magnetic
hard disk drives, commodity x86 computers, and Debian for long-term data
storage with ensured integrity?
I use LVM on ext4, and I add a MD5SUMS file at the root.
I then power up the drives at least once a year and check the MD5SUMS.
A simple CRC could also work, obviously.
So far, I have not detected MORE corruption with this method than the
drive ECC itself (current drives & buses are much better than they
used to be). When I have errors detected, I replace the file with
another copy (I usually have multiple off-site copies, and sometimes
even on-site online copies, but not always). When the errors add
up, it is time to buy another drive, usually after 5+ years or
even sometimes 10+ years.
So, just re-reading the content might be enough, once a year or so.
This is for HDD (for SDD I have no offline storage experience, it
could be shorter).
Thank you for the reply.
So, an ext4 file system on an LVM logical volume?
Why LVM? Are you implementing redundancy (RAID)? Is your data larger
than a single disk (concatenation/ JBOD)? Something else?
David
