windows disk mirroring repair corrupted data

Diversity

New Member
LS,

In a pre ReFS era, is it possible to somehow run a process(can be 3rd party software) that scans all disks (minimum of 3) in a mirror setup. If all but 1 disk have the same data then repair that 1 bad data to be similar to the others.

If more than 1 disk report some different data then something is going badly wrong and manual intervention is needed. In such a scenario could the data on each individual disk still be manually checked (for example by opening the file and see if it works) and then copying that file to the other individual disks.

Now to a ReFS era, is the automatic repairing of bad data in a mirror supported in ReFS?

Kind regards,

Ed
 
is it possible
Yes but in real life the process fails more offen than it works which makes it worthless as a backup option... the point of a backup is 100% will always work, 95% or 55% is not a number people can live with.
 
While ReFS can handle data corruption; having all the integrity checks enabled will absolutely kill your performance. Two drives mirrored is plenty adequate for most systems for redundancy. If you have 3 or more then you should configure them as a RAID 5 for the data resiliency of ReFS while not taking such a huge performance hit.
 
There are such things as software parity systems that you yourself can use to create a data file that can be used to repair corrupt files.
I've used QuickPar and MuiltiPar before to do such operations for data written to DVD's that I did not want to become corruptible. I included 100MB of parity data for every 1GB to help reduce the chance that a scratched DVD could be rendered completely useless.

The way it works is you set the amount of parity data you wish to create for a data set, and then the parity data would be able to recover data corrupted (or complete files lost) of that same size. The good versions of software parity software come with command line programs as well so you could possibly script a backup, then script a parity set to be created for the backup.

Some good reading on WikiPedia about Parchive type programs: Parchive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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