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Old 07-12-2014, 12:37 PM
Robert57 Robert57 is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Alexandria, VA
Posts: 4
Bit-Rot and Superduper! smart updates

Dave,

I have read recently that data left on HFS+ external hard drives for a couple or more years are in danger of corruption, through "bit-rot", or perhaps a magnetic weakening or disturbance over time. I have a large collection of music on an external Firewire drive that I smart- update to a clone back-up drive about weekly, as I gradually add to and edit my iTunes music library. But I worry that stale sectors of the primary media drive may get corrupted after a few years and that that corruption may be automatically copied over to the target back-up drive in my periodic smart back-ups. Or would Smart Update not copy this bit rot corruption since there is no change in the date of data modification? I gather a ZFS formating would help detect and possibly avoid this kind of corruption, but that is academic for now in Mac-world.

Any hard drive maintenance/ hygiene advice on avoiding bit-rot, or other magnetic corruption, over many years would much appreciated. I just bought a third hard drive that I plan to alternate with the older target back-up drive (perhaps once a month) to give me additional redundancy. Should one do a complete erase and copy procedure to clean and reload the data on older back-up drives every few years?

By the way, should external back-up drives always be formatted as HFS+ (Journaled), even if the original drive was not journaled?

Thanks for your help.

Robert

Last edited by Robert57; 07-12-2014 at 12:42 PM.
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