PAR2: The Tool That Protects Long-Term Backups From Bit Rot
Bit rot is the failure mode nobody plans for: a file that was fine last year won’t open today, no error, no warning, no dramatic failure to point to. One bit somewhere flipped from a 0 to a 1, and now something chokes on it. Everyone plans for the drive dying. Almost nobody plans for the drive quietly lying to them instead. There’s a tool built specifically for this, decades old, still actively maintained, and most people have never heard of it: PAR2. ...