Fighting Silent Data Corruption: WHS

L

lordsegan

Gawd
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
Messages
624
I currently have my main computer attached to a WHS server. I have copied my various documents and storage folders to the "Share" folders of the WHS server.

Tonight I am going to do a full computer back up to the WHS.

I am going to backup the share folders on the WHS with an off-sife eSata drive.

I was about to install SyncToy to auto-sync my documents folders with the share folders.

Then I paused.

If I get silent data corruption on my main PC, SyncToy will copy that over to the share folders. That will leave me only with the fallback of the offsite back up and the full PC backup, at whatever age those images rest at.

So.. should I use SyncToy or just manually move my files over to the share folders at various intervals? I guess manually moving files won't be much safer than SyncToy eh?
 
I don't see how manually moving files would be any better.

Use SyncToy once now if you trust that your files are ok.

Then, every time that you run it, you can preview the changes.
 
In my understanding of "Silent" data corruption the only real way to fight it is with monitoring and backups. The reason ZFS can combat it at a filesystem level is because of the redundancy that it builds into certain configurations like a RAID-Z etc.

There are probably some software products you can run that will periodically run MD5 checksums of all of your data to ensure it has not changed, but without some sort of data redundancy the corruption is not easily remedied.

If the data is already corrupted on your disks, then moving it will neither exacerbate or help the issue, the data will be corrupt whether you move it or not.

If you are worried about data corruption during the transfer use a specialized tool that will compare the MD5 hashes of the data it reads to the data it writes (Paid version of TeraCopy will do this, I do not know which free tools to recommend). Surely there are some minor risks still in this process if the hard disk reads a sector improperly etc however unless you are worried about some mission critical applications to a business then I would venture to guess this is about the safest you can get.
 
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