Now Playing
AVForums Super Veteran
Until recently I'd never given much thought to bit rot where my music was concerned, however, a series of issues I had with drives failing etc. led me to rethink how I'm storing and backing up my music. Having just about completed deduplication and consolidation of all my music I figured it was time to check on the health of the underlying FLAC files. The results are scary and in many cases where I've abandoned an old backup in favour of a fresh copy of the "production files" I've ended up abandoning good files and backing up their corrupted cousins.
Do yourself a favour, periodically check the integrity of your files. Windows users can use dbpoweramp or the free multithreaded audiotester. For Linux users the following script can do the job for you:
Bottom line is that as drives have grown in size so they've become less reliable. Where possible I'd strongly recommend switching to a filesystem that can detect and correct bit rot.
Do yourself a favour, periodically check the integrity of your files. Windows users can use dbpoweramp or the free multithreaded audiotester. For Linux users the following script can do the job for you:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
szDate=`/bin/date`
szMusicRoot='/mnt/media/Music'
szErrFile="$szMusicRoot/flac_errors.txt"
echo Recursively testing flacs in $szMusicRoot
echo Flac decoding errors logged to $szErrFile
echo Flac test of $szMusicRoot started at $szDate >"$szErrFile"
echo Errors were found in the following flac files: >>"$szErrFile"
/bin/find "$szMusicRoot/" -name '*.flac' -type f -not -exec /usr/bin/flac -t --totally-silent '{}' \; -and -print >>"$szErrFile"
szDate=`/bin/date`
echo Flac tests of $szMusicRoot compleated at $szDate >>"$szErrFile"
echo Done!Bottom line is that as drives have grown in size so they've become less reliable. Where possible I'd strongly recommend switching to a filesystem that can detect and correct bit rot.
