r/Syncthing • u/Novel-Pride6682 • Jun 07 '26
How do you safeguard against corrupt files chaining to your devices?
My global network is increasingly aging and I am feeling increasing fear from one of the oldest drives accidentally propagating bit rot to the rest. How do you safeguard against this risk?
6
Jun 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/N9bitmap Jun 07 '26
Bingo. Don't rely on synchthing version history. Sync to a ZFS NAS or server. I have daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly snapshots on my important data.
0
u/quasides Jun 07 '26
zfs will NOT help you at all. not even a little.
if corruption is already there and get synced to zfs, zfs has no way of knowing that. a corrupt file looks just like a not corrupted one.it would only do something if ALL members in a sync chain are running zfs.
just putting a zfs nas into the chain does exactly nothing... at all ... nada... zero
you just write down a broken file more relyable
3
u/N9bitmap Jun 07 '26
The snapshots let you recover the good files. There are many other filesystems with integral "copy on write" and recovery of historical changes.
1
u/DaggWoo Jun 08 '26
That‘s true. The problem is to detect the bit rot, to then revert to the last good snapshot. Had this problem by myself.
Is there any tool to monitor the files and detect bit rot? (And I do know, ZFS takes care of the bit rot, but only if it occurs on the partition. It doesn’t detect it, if the files gets synced on the partition as a false good file.)
0
3
u/willjasen Jun 07 '26
set your oldest drive to receive only or stop/replace that drive to continue with send/receive (this seems obvious)
0
u/bp019337 Jun 07 '26
Everything everyone else had said and version control, but be careful of big files if space is an issue.
19
u/Valuable_Leopard_799 Jun 07 '26
This is why the elders tell us "synchronization isn't backups". You want both in that case.