We use hard drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) as massstorage devicefor our computers.
Undoubtedly, these storages are efficient and cost-effective.
But none of these last forever.
Among the different limitations of these storages, bit rot is considered the most invasive one.
It can make your data corrupt and, in severe cases, make them inaccessible.
You should have a proper and detailed understanding of bit rot to protect your precious data.
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What Is Bit Rot?
This phenomenon is also known as data rot, data degradation, data deterioration, and data decay.
In case of minimal deterioration, you’re able to still jump into the files.
But, when bit rot affects the complete gear, you wont be able to jump into the data.
In fact, severe bit rot results in unrecoverable data bits that even data recovery applications cant recover.
Format rot is another key in of bit rot.
It happens when modern computers stores file with an unsupported data format.
For example, DOC is the older file format of DOCX.
Though the latest Microsoft text document files are saved in DOCX format, it still supports DOC files.
Therefore, it’s possible for you to still open and view DOC files on your modern computer.
However, developers often create more advanced file formats and stop supporting old formats.
Thus, you become unable to pull up the content of those old files using any hardware or software.
This situation is called bit rot or format rot.
Also read:What Is a Storage gear?
Punched Cards and Tapes
The raw materials of these storage devices come from natural resources.
Hence, the media gradually rots over time.
In such devices, data rot happens due to wear and tear.
Data becomes inaccessible when the magnetic polarity of these devices changes at the bit level.
Hence, the computer can read data from this gear 35 times faster than HDDs.
In this storage, NAND cell charge leakage causes bit rot.
Though insulated layers guard the floating gate, electric charge can still leak out gradually.
If you regularly use SSDs, only minor bit rot can happen that can be recovered with powerful software.
Also read:What Is NVMe Over TCP (NVMe/TCP)
4.
Optical Media Storages
CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs are categorized as optical storage devices.
These storages can get damaged by different environmental factors, including heat, moisture, dust, etc.
These elements prevent the data reading head from extracting data from the transparent plastic surface of such devices.
Its one jot down of bit rot.
How to Detect Bit Rot?
The MD5 checksum should provide you with the same digital footprint or hash code that it generated last time.
If both hash codes match, there is no bit rot.
How Can You Prevent Bit Rot?
When it comes to a mass storage rig, bit rot is unavoidable.
Its not possible to completely stop it from happening.
Use High-Quality HDDs and SSDs
You should never compromise on the quality of your storage devices.
it’s crucial that you use HDDs of supreme quality as these store data on metal plates.
Getting SSDs from reliable brands helps you minimize the chance of data loss due to severe bit rot.
Itll help you verify if your storage devices have the required level of data integrity.
you’re free to clone the data of a whole drive and store it in the backup drive.
In scenarios like primary HDD failure, you could seamlessly connect to the backup HDD.
Based on the plan you choose, the platform will securely store your data for a stipulated time.
It doesnt need to purchase additional hardware or software.
With these computers, you could create a LAN online grid and connect all the storage devices using it.
If one of the hard drives fails, you could recover data from the other HDDs.
Conclusion
Bit rot is a severe yet inevitable problem with storage devices.
No matter which gear you use for storing data, bit rot can happen to you over time.
Also, it’s possible for you to practice the preventive measures mentioned here.
Have you ever suffered from bit rot?
Tell us your experience in the comment section.
You should also share this article with your friends to make them aware of this issue.
Also, readhow to install an NVMe SSD on a desktop or laptop.
