My flash drive corrupted a couple of weeks ago. It wouldn't boot because of checksum errors on the bz* files. Every single one of them had a bad sha256 sum.

I tried to restore to an old USB drive and got it up and running, however the license wouldn't activate because that old USB was blacklisted. Very annoying, but ok.

Now I have purchased a USB DOM on eBay, and I've beaten the crap out of it with badblocks and f3 programs, and it seems to be 100% reliable under those tests. Great! I'm about to load it up and put it into "production".

But here's the problem. I did identify one config file (a docker template xml file for the program glances) which was corrupted. I could load it in a text editor but many characters were garbage. Incredibly lucky of me that the only obvious non-bz* corrupted config file was for a program which requires virtually no configuration, so I can just delete it and make it from scratch with no trouble. All of my other docker templates seem ok.

And all of my USB flash backups had that file corrupted as well. That's the fundamental problem that I'm scratching my head about with how Unraid's architecture is built.

Ok, we are forced to use kind of cheap-o flash memory (nearly all USB flash is unreliable) for the main OS unless you research and look really hard for something better, and that's where the config files reside, and they could be prone to corruption. Well if it corrupts, just restore from a backup. But.... what are the odds that your backup is not also corrupted? Kind of low, actually.... since you will not likely discover the corruption until a reboot, and you may reboot the server once a month - and that's being good about it. How many of us keep backups from months ago, and would you want to restore something so old anyway?

It's honestly surprising to me that an OS which is completely built around data storage and data integrity, forces us to use a FAT32 file system which has no checksumming and will not even throw an error on reading when files are corrupted (until the reboot). Like a Ferrari that must be started with a hand-crank.

Anyway, forgive my rant. What I really need to know is, how do I vet this flash backup for corruption? EVERY bz* file did not pass the checksum, and my "config" directory contains 377 MB of data, so if I were to take a bet on it I would think that there is more corrupt data in there but I just don't know how to find it. How do I approach this aside from just finding out what's broken from using the system?

Edited October 1, 2025Oct 1 by singularity098

contact support.

Licensing and documentiaotn exist and clearly sate that if you blacklist the usb that device id can't be reused...