You have to make the best of what you have to work with needless to say. Are you making arguments im favor of long term optical storage? It doesn't seem so, but if you were, you lost me.
On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 05:32:33 AM EST, Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 05:42:55AM +0000, Chris via cctalk wrote: [...] > The only answer that anyone can provide is redundancy. Keep 2 or 3 copies > of everything on seperate external drives. Every 3 to 5 years buy new > drives and transfer the data to them. Or just run checkdisk twice a year > and wait for 1 drive to start popping errors. Replace it. Wait for other > to fail. Then replace it. If you mean CHKDSK.EXE, it's broadly equivalent to Unix fsck plus a surface scan, and all fsck does is check and repair filesystem _metadata_. If the metadata is corrupt then that's a good sign that the data itself is also toast, but a successful verification of the metadata does not tell you anything useful about the data itself. The surface scan asks the drive to read each sector, and relies on the disk correctly identifying sectors which have changed from when they were written. This is almost always the case, but that "< 1 in 10¹⁴" in the datasheet is still not zero. And that's before we consider dodgy SATA cables and buggy disk controllers. (SAS won't save you either: what it gives in increased quality, it takes away in extra complexity.) On typical Windows desktop computers, the probability that something else will go wrong and destroy the system is way higher than the raw error rate of the disk, but on non-toy systems with many tens or hundreds of terabytes of data, the probability of a disk lying rises uncomfortably-close to 1. A good filesystem needs to defend against disks which do that. FAT and NTFS are not good filesystems by that measure.