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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Checksum for original files came out unreadable (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Does that mean there was bitrot ready in the original file? Something else? How is the checksum even generated successfully if it's corrupted or undreadable in the first place.

Any way to fix?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It is important that you check to see if the file really is pristine after you take the first checksum. That you can read and use the file. Otherwise you may take a checksum of a file that is already corrupt. That is not very useful.

Most likely it is not actually spontaneous bitrot. It is much more likely that somebody made the file corrupt. Usually it is some form of user error.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Its an audio file. I can play it but cant tell easily without playing through it to see if it is corrupted at certain parts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Then you have to assume that the file already is at least a little corrupt. What you need to determine is if the level of corruption is so bad that it is a problem. If it crash an audioplayer or the file sounds bad. Ideally you have a backup copy that is better or you can download or create a new file that works OK. Possibly you can re-encode the file to fix problems. It will degrade audio quality if the encoding is lossy. But perhaps not enough to be noticeable.

Some audio file formats have embedded checksums. FLAC or WavPack. Perhaps more? You should be able to find utilites that can compare the embedded checksum with the current stored data.

In the future use a checksummed format or store separate checksums. Or zip the files. The zip format has embedded checksums. (Same with all(?) other compressed formats.)