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Normally to make a fault-tolerant or corruption-repairing filesystem, you use multiple drives and raid 5, or anything but raid 0.

There are also many ways to make a fault-tolerant archive file like dar etc.

What I am looking for is a way to make a single external ssd safer against bitrot from extended unpowered storage, yet otherwise use the drive as a normal drive, just mount and read/write files when I want like any other filesystem. Merely "when I want" can sometimes be years apart.

"normal" doesn't mean usable from Windows and Mac. Linux-only is ok.

Brian White
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    raid can not repair corruption, it only knows there is a mismatch, not which one is correct. instead it relies on the drives to report bad sectors as read errors. if you think that your drive will report read errors properly, you could partition it and run raid across its partitions, to create a single drive raid5/6. that would be kinda weird but it should work. but still not the same as proper checksums. – frostschutz Mar 29 '23 at 07:26
  • Yes raid or ecc in general, does or can, replace lost information as well as detect and correct corrupt information, simply depending on the algorithm and the amount of redundant data maintained. Yes one *could* create a virtual raid out of image files or partitions, but that is essentially using a solution which exists for the block device layer and virtualizing it just to use it at the filesystem layer. The question is, doesn't an equivalent exist at the filesystem layer? – Brian White Mar 30 '23 at 09:50

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