I guess, my primary concern was if I didn’t have the computer with ZFS(in my case btrfs but similar thing). Maybe it is for the best that I keep the raid setup to scrub and make sure important data is safe, and use the smaller single disk mini PC for services and data that isn’t as important.
Comment on Is bit rot really a threat that I should worry about?
dragontamer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Wait, what’s wrong with issuing “ZFS Scan” every 3 to 6 months or so? If it detects bitrot, it immediately fixes it. As long as the bitrot wasn’t too much, most of your data should be fixed.
If you’re playing with multiple computers, “choosing” one to be a NAS and being extremely careful with its data that its storing makes sense. Regularly scanning all files and attempting repairs (which is just a few clicks with most NAS software) is incredibly easy, and probably could be automated.
mouse@midwest.social 10 months ago
dragontamer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you have a NAS, then just put iSCSI disks on the NAS, and network-share those iSCSI fake-disks to your mini-PCs.
mouse@midwest.social 10 months ago
Thanks for that information about iSCSI, I hadn’t looked into it. I will probably just stick with my primary server for the moment, maybe rebuild it into a NAS, and than use mini PCs with it as the storage.
iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Does the smart thing in omv take care of this? Anyone know? Obviously I’m a novice haha.
markstos@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You don’t define bitrot. If you leave software alone with no updates for long enough, yes, there will be problems.
There will eventually be a security issue with no fix, or a new OS or hardware it doesn’t work on.
Backups can also fail over time if restores are not tested periodically.
This recently happened to me. A server wouldn’t boot anymore, so we restored from backup, but it still wouldn’t boot. The issue was that we’d introduced change that caused a boot failure. To fix that by restoring from a backup, we’d need a backup from before that change. It turns out we had one, but didn’t realize what the issue was.
The other moral is to reboot frequently if only to confirm the system can still boot.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s not what storage engineers mean when they say “bitrot”.
“Bitrot”, in the scope of ZFS and BTFS means the situation where a hard-drive’s “0” gets randomly flipped to “1” during storage. It is a well known problem and can happen within “months”. Especially as a 20-TB drive these days is a collection of 160 Trillion bits, there’s a high chance that at least some of those bits malfunction over a period of ~double-digit months.