I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?
To clarify,
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None of this is commercially important; I just don’t want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.
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Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.
If you are fine with changing your file system, check out zfs. It stores checksums with your data, and can, if configured to store multiple copies, repair corruption.