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Bit Rot

The slow, silent corruption of stored data over time due to hardware imperfections.

Traditional filesystems can't detect bit rot, so a photo may quietly become unreadable. Checksumming filesystems like ZFS and Btrfs detect and repair it when redundancy is present.

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Checksum

A small fingerprint of data used to detect corruption or verify integrity.

ZFS

An advanced filesystem and volume manager offering data integrity, snapshots, compression and software RAID.

ECC RAM(Error-Correcting Code Memory)

Memory that detects and corrects common data errors on the fly for greater reliability.