I tried googling and searching forums but most of the articles were pretty old and I could not find a definitive answer so...

 

Is bitrot a problem that can occur with unraid? or is an array with unraid protected aautomatically?

 

I have an XFS array storing media files, some I rarely ever access, Do I need to do anything to protect against bitrot?

 

Does running parity check find any bitrot? does it fix it?

 

What should I do, install etc to protect my files against rot? 

 

Thanks!

For bitrot (if it's an actual thing) you need checksums of the files on the array.  Look at Dynamix File Integrity

1 hour ago, Squid said:

... bitrot (if it's an actual thing) ...

 

Many of us consider this to be the truth---  Bitrot is not a problem with Modern Hard drives for a number of technical reasons.  And furthermore, if Bitrot ever does occur, it probably happens in RAM rather than on the the platters of a hard disk!  (Either before or after the data is written to or read from the disk.)  So if it is a concern to you, you should be using ECC Memory as well as a checksum utility.

On 2/7/2022 at 12:05 AM, Frank1940 said:

Bitrot is not a problem with Modern Hard drives

 

Can bits on a hard disk unexpectedly change?

 

 

11 hours ago, Jaybau said:

Can bits on a hard disk unexpectedly change?

 

YES!  They are called 'read errors'.  Most (soft errors) can be corrected on the fly and the majority of the time, you are not even aware of them.  (The manufacturers all use propriety error detecting and correcting encoding algorithms  when writing data to the disk. )    Read errors, that can not be fixed (hard errors), can result in data loss on the hard disk in question.  Unraid parity can can fix both of these.

21 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

Unraid parity can can fix both of these.

 

*if the drive reports the error