PC Gaming

8635 readers

308 users here now

For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki

Rules:

Be Respectful.
No Spam or Porn.
No Advertising.
No Memes.
No Tech Support.
No questions about buying/building computers.
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

425

US copyright law 'forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods' for game preservation, say historians who are 'disappointed' after being denied a DMCA exemption (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

powered occasionally to hold data

A bit more detail: simply being powered on won't necessarily stop that.

You want something checksumming the data and making sure it's not silently rotting off the disk.

ZFS does this, something like snapraid can do it too, and there's various other methods of making checksums you can validate data integrity with and be able to repair minor corruption. (PAR files, for example.)

A real-world example of this kind of oops is everyone's favorite Youtube Tech Personality(TM) LTT who lost a fuck-ton of data due to not scrubbing data on a ZFS array and had to go through months of restoration to get most of it back, so uh, yeah, make sure you've taken steps to detect and correct the bitrot that's going to happen anyways.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just as an addition, nothing against ZFS it is a great FS, but BTRFS can this too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, that wasn't meant to be remotely comprehensive: there's a lot of ways you can do this ranging from the filesystem to what kind of archives you're storing, to programs that make parity data for validation.

...also, since I haven't started a flamewar yet today, I don't think I'd personally use BTRFS. It's still too new, has had data consistency issues too recently, and just plain doesn't have the kind of historical performance record for something I'd want to use for archival purposes.

Come back in another decade and we'll see how it's been going.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

All fair and good arguments, so no flamewar today. Sorry 😜