Hi HN,<p>Under what situations should I worry about bit rot in 2015 rather than just outright disk failure?<p>For my photo album? For my postgres database with important data?<p>Does SSD make a difference?
Not sure if you're already aware, but "bit rot" is an ambiguous term nowadays.<p>The original definition[1] refers jokingly to bits "rotting" as an (obviously false if taken literally) explanation of why software that used to work fine has stopped working after a period of time elapsed, actually because of causes now more properly(?) known as "software rot"[2], but the term is sometimes (mistakenly IMHO) used to refer to actual data degradation[3], or "data rot"[3]<p>This whole sorry tale is actually due to the related but little-known phenomenon of "sememe rot", a gradual decay in units of meaning so that thoughts and sentences that used to be perfectly coherent will gradually become incomprehensible, or even worse come to mean something different, even quite opposite, to their original import.<p>Anyway, from your SSD question I guess you're interested in data degradation. The best advice here is just the obvious: "always back up!" Though this doesn't answer the interesting question as to whether data degradation is more or less of a problem this year than last, it is still the best strategy.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot</a><p>[3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation</a>