Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Had a storage machine in cold storage and unpowered for almost an entire year. Advice on insuring data integrity on startup? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by Captain_Starkiller@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Had a storage machine carrying some important data that's been in cold storage for a year. Not too worried about the hdds, but thinking the SSDs could use a good once over to make sure none of the files have decayed. Not really sure how to do that though, was thinking of maybe running a virus scanner over the whole thing as that should force the system to look at every file, and maybe the ssd/hdd error correction will make sure everything is up to snuff. Any advice? Is there a better way?

System is running windows so some Linux tools are trickier to fire up without creating some kind of live disc or something.

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[–] dr100@alien.top 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Back up as soon as possible everything you care about from there, starting with the small stuff. Then next time when you have "some important data" have multiple copies of it and check them periodically.

[–] Captain_Starkiller@alien.top 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that's kinda basic data preservation practice.

The ssds are just windows and installed programs. No point to making a backup, but I do have a system image backed up to hdd anyway.

I more just want to make sure they're in the best shape possible after booting up, and wondered if anyone had any guidance on that.

[–] dr100@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Probably full read (like a badblocks in Linux or HD Tune Pro in Windows) should check everything on the physical level (note that all storage nowadays has checksums and even recovery data itself, this is why mostly everyone can ignore all the checksumming file systems without mostly everything falling apart).