Dear fellow Monks,

Can you help me figure out a way to enhance the reliability of my photo collection? It now has ~40Gb and it still grows.

It seems reasonable to write a script that stores ECC (error correcting code) data, such as Reed-Solomon along with the files so that in case of bad sectors, these could be recovered. It will also allow for automatic discovery and correction of errors (say during a monthly pass) with a reasonable cost of 50% increase in storage.

There is a neat project that does that for DVD storage (called DVDisaster) but it is not directly applicable for hard-disk based solution. Can anyone point me to information on how to apply a similar approach to hard disk based storage?
1. What is the failure characteristics (blocks? sectors? )
2. How to deal with read errors?
3. Is there an implementation of reed-solomon in Perl or should an external program be used (few open-source ones available)

Thanks

2006-03-28 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Redundant Backup'

In reply to (OT) Redundant Backup by fundflow

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