Does Bit Rot exist?

Well folks, after several horrendous issues with digital image corruption, I have to say, yes it does!

And it’s really painful too.

Imagine a sort of slow corruption, randomly, over of all your digital images, (holiday snaps, portfolio, work etc) – you come to look at a folder of images and half of them look like the example above.

Worst of all, your PC can be working perfectly without error or issue.

How? Why?

If you have a large collection of photographs, built up over years, it’s a hair pulling moment of complete grief.

The only solution is multiple backups of the same file – as you don’t know when bit rot will strike – the images on the backups may be damaged too. So you can only ‘step back in time’ through your backups until you find an uncorrupted image.

To date, I have no idea why this happens.

It seems to affect JPEGS the most, but I have had NEFS also corrupted in this manner. All completely at random – different files/folders/disks – I have looked into disk drivers/hardware/firmware/operating systems etc all to no avail.

The really strange thing is this only ever happens with image files – any other type of file – ZIP archives, word processing and spreadsheet documents, films, audio etc are all uncorrupted.

There is a fantastic tool to trawl though your images and find potential file corruption, called Image Verifier – it does not fix the images, but does save you the work of having to physically check 1000’s of images yourself! It does require a lot of processor power – don’t expect to do anything else while it is running, but it’s still a winner in my book.