I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?
To clarify,
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None of this is commercially important; I just don’t want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.
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Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.
Worried in the sense that having a backup is a good idea, most filesystems do not have much protection from a file becoming corrupted, but random corruption is rare. Personally I like an automated, regular cloud backup to B2 and also do a local one that is easier (faster) to restore. For local, I prefer Borg (or rather the Pika Backup frontend) because you can easily store different dates while also benefitting from file deduplication.
So which filesystems are better for archiving?
I think ZFS with redundancy is typically the gold standard.