Bitrot Qnap Ext4

Looking for a long term cold storage (the data is not used actively anymore) option for about 30TB of data and was looking at QNAP RAID 6 option as base for this backup. (I will have individual 3 x 10 TB drives offsite as well (2 off site locations)). I know the Raid 6 will give me drive failure protection, but activating scrubbing, will that be the best option for super long term storage and protection of data corrosion? Plus, if I power this NAS down, how often should I power it up to perform this scrubbing?

My real big concern is data loss from bitrot over long periods of time.

A Data scrubbing will not prelong the lifetime of the drive itself, but it will surely prevent data corruption and loss. I would surely recommend having scribing function activated on a monthly bases. If you plan on keeping your NAS off most of the time, then these routines will need to be activated manually unless you set up a wake-up routine to do the checks and shut it down automatically.

“The standard hard drive warranty runs about 5 years. That number is assuming regular use, so if a drive were to be plugged in and have data written to it infrequently, and stored in a dry space with optimal temperatures, there’s no reason that it couldn’t last far longer than that—in the range of seven or even eight years. ” says lifehacker

Any Qnap NAS will allow you to do regular scrubbing tests. But I recommend getting something like TS-453be or different bay models where CPU is Intel-based.

Data scrubbing is an error correction technique that uses a background task to periodically inspect main memory or storage for errors, then correct detected errors using redundant data in the form of different checksums or copies of data. Data scrubbing reduces the likelihood that single correctable errors will accumulate, leading to reduced risks of uncorrectable errors.

Data integrity is a high-priority concern in writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing of the computer data in computer operating systems and in computer storage and data transmission systems. However, only a few of the currently existing and used file systems provide sufficient protection against data corruption.

To address this issue, data scrubbing provides routine checks of all inconsistencies in data and, in general, prevention of hardware or software failure. This “scrubbing” feature occurs commonly in memory, disk arrays, file systems, or FPGAs as a mechanism of error detection and correction. Read more on Wikipedia

How to set it up?

Running RAID Scrubbing on a Schedule

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