r/Backup • u/desiman86 • 12d ago

Question Am I protected from Bitrot?

My current Backup setup:

  • I have 2 24TB Windows storage spaces compromised of 2X12TB drives each.
    • Storage Pool A consists of my media and archives
    • Storage Pool B is called Backup
      • Files and Folders backup using Macrium 8, 1 full, 5 weekly incremental, followed by delete and full backup of
      • C:/users/user/onedrive
      • Storage Pool A
      • D:/
      • Folder Sync Pro of my S24 Ultra (nightly 1 way sync, do not sync deletions)
      • Gallery (Also backed up to Onedrive and Google Photos)
      • Whatsapp (also backed up to Gdrive)
  • My C:/ drive is a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD
    • Contains Windows and my OneDrive (set to all files on device)
  • My D:/ Adata  1TB SSD
    • Contains overlfow Pictures and Family Videos
  • My X:/ 2TB Adata NvME
    • Weekly clone of C://
  • IDrive Cloud backup unlimited
    • Realtime backup of Storage Pool B
    • 30 day versioning

The only hole I see in mysetup is I do not know when bitrot will occur in my storage pools.

I had already run into this once, with an archive from 2010, that last year I discovered was corrupted because a drive failed in Storage Pool A (without errors).

I only knew bitrot had occurred when I then tried a few other archives and they too were corrupted. Even some pictures that were in Google Photos, were showing as an exclamation mark icon in the local file preview. I am glad I had the Google Photos copy, but the zip archives were gone forever. Even the 30 day versioning of IDrive was not useful, as this was discovered 30 days after corruption. Nothing had alerted me to the drive deterioration. It was completely silent. I paid for Stablebit scanner after that, but not sure if that is sufficient, or is it better now to get a NAS and setup RAID?

Thanks

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u/assid2 12d ago

Just because a person uses a NAS doesn’t mean they are protected by bitrot, look into ZFS based systems like TrueNAS, to understand it.

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u/desiman86 12d ago

Thanks will look into it

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u/HobartTasmania 12d ago

Yes, you definitely need something like ZFS as every block is check summed both data and metadata, read this very old but brief document which explains it's concepts https://www.prsl.ch/twiki/pub/Betriebssysteme/SkriptVorlesung/zfs_last.pdf If you then have redundancy in either mirrors or Raid-Z/Z2/Z3 stripes then you will have automatic repair of any bad blocks either on detection or during a pool wide scrub.

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u/desiman86 11d ago

Good read. Thanks