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I store a lot of data on hdds that I rarely use unless required (once or twice a year) Is it possible to make sure the existent files are working correctly and not corrupted without testing them one by one?

I've recently started using corz checksum (excelent program btw) to make sure files are intact in I need to check them, a corrupt file will have a different hash right? Or is this a bad method to know my files are working?

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Files very rarely corrupt. What can happen is that the disk becomes unreadable, and then its a problem with all your archives, not with just a given file.

If you are paranoid, you can keep a file with the hashes of the files on your archive disk and periodically recompute the hashes of the files on the disk(*). At least that will make you discover early enough that your archive is unreadable.

But when this happens you can only cry if you haven't got a backup of the archive, so IMHO you would be better inspired to have two disks and not worry too much about the individual file checksums.

(*) the canonical way is to use md5sum (standard issue in Linux, easy top find for Windows and OSX) which can create the list of hashes, and also checn files against that list.

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  • So to check if they are readable i'd just have to try and copy them to other hd. But how can I be sure I'm not copying a corrupt file?
    – ng80092a
    Jul 15, 2017 at 13:06
  • Also, what if I try to checksum a file that can't be read, will I get some kind of error?
    – ng80092a
    Jul 15, 2017 at 13:07
  • As I said, in my experience corrupt file occur much less frequently that plain unreadable media. Either the checksum program will complain that it cannot read the file, or it will compute a bad checksum and report that, so in both cases you'll be told.
    – xenoid
    Jul 15, 2017 at 13:14

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