Thanks! Yeah, I have a separate SBC connected to a spinny HDD for backups of user data, plus I mirror it in the cloud. The snapshots are for when I mess up something on my system.
BTRFS has native checksumming, so it will detect any bitrot that occurs. Additionally it supports various RAID levels. So if you have some level of replication or parity, then combined with the checksums, it will automatically correct bitrot as well.
A proper backup strategy is of course still necessary.
I’m running a 60TB btrfs RAID with all the bells and whistles myself and just recently had an instance of some file being fucked up (probably just the wrong metadata bit being affected or something), which I noticed because btrfs send would repeatedly crash at that inum. All the redundancy may be there, but sometimes it’s not able to recover automagically.
Not hating on btrfs at all - it helped me recover from a few fubar situations that could easily have been total data loss - but magical thinking (about all the fancy features) is dangerous.
Huh, that sound very weird… If for example you’re running RAID1, then all bits of the metadata should be duplicated. So unless the same bit of metadata was also corrupted on the other disk, it should be recoverable…
Beware of bit rot though. Snapshots help with user error, not with cosmic rays or worse.
A separate full backup is still required as well.
Thanks! Yeah, I have a separate SBC connected to a spinny HDD for backups of user data, plus I mirror it in the cloud. The snapshots are for when I mess up something on my system.
BTRFS has native checksumming, so it will detect any bitrot that occurs. Additionally it supports various RAID levels. So if you have some level of replication or parity, then combined with the checksums, it will automatically correct bitrot as well.
A proper backup strategy is of course still necessary.
I’m running a 60TB btrfs RAID with all the bells and whistles myself and just recently had an instance of some file being fucked up (probably just the wrong metadata bit being affected or something), which I noticed because
btrfs sendwould repeatedly crash at that inum. All the redundancy may be there, but sometimes it’s not able to recover automagically.Not hating on btrfs at all - it helped me recover from a few fubar situations that could easily have been total data loss - but magical thinking (about all the fancy features) is dangerous.
Huh, that sound very weird… If for example you’re running RAID1, then all bits of the metadata should be duplicated. So unless the same bit of metadata was also corrupted on the other disk, it should be recoverable…
What checksum algorithm are you running?