{"id":218,"date":"2011-05-24T11:45:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T11:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timbrison.wordpress.com\/?p=218"},"modified":"2014-01-14T13:14:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-14T13:14:57","slug":"bit-rot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/bit-rot\/","title":{"rendered":"Bit Rot!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"corrupt<\/a>Does Bit Rot exist?<\/p>\n

Well folks, after several horrendous issues with digital image corruption, I have to say, yes it does!<\/p>\n

And it’s\u00a0really<\/strong>\u00a0painful too.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Imagine a sort of slow corruption, randomly<\/strong><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, your PC can be working perfectly without error or issue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How? Why?<\/p>\n

If you have a large collection of photographs, built up over years, it’s a hair pulling moment of complete grief.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The only solution is multiple backups of the same<\/strong><\/em> file – as you don’t know when<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

To date, I have no idea why this happens.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There is a fantastic tool to trawl though your images and find potential file corruption, called Image Verifier<\/a> – 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<\/strong><\/em> of processor power – don’t expect to do anything else while it is running, but it’s still a winner in my book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does Bit Rot exist? Well folks, after several horrendous issues with digital image corruption, I have to say, yes it does! And it’s\u00a0really\u00a0painful too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[11,16,32],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-tech","category-photography","tag-bit-rot","tag-corruption","tag-jpeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":879,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}