For all their compactness and ease of access, are our files going to prove less durable than a clay tablet recording a commercial transaction over 4,000 years ago?
storage
Tests bring some surprises, with encrypted sparse bundles looking resilient to small amounts of corruption.
Looks at plain text, CSV, XML, JSON, RTF, RTFD, .docx, .xlsx, and PDF. Which should you trust with your important documents in archives?
Which format – alongside Camera Raw – should you store archived images in: JPEG, PNG, TIFF or Apple’s new HEIC?
Simply having ECC enabled doesn’t mean that damaged files can be recovered. It appears promising, but needs careful real-world evaluation.
We assume what we know to be impossible, and pretend that just making ‘safe’ copies of important documents will preserve them for the future.
Do you want ECC for your important documents? It’s available now, free, without the complications of ZFS or cost of RAID 6.
A nimbler version of Dintch is designed to drag and drop files and smaller folders to tag then and check their integrity.
More about checking the integrity of files on macOS, with a new version of a free utility, news of the next apps, and error-correcting code perhaps?
To check the integrity of important documents, we’re going to calculate their SHA256 digests. But where should those be stored if HFS+ and APFS don’t have a suitable attribute?
The Eclectic Light Company 