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Does Perkeep (PKA Camlistore) offer protection from silent corruption (eg. bitrot) of the data in its current design like what is offered in ZFS. If it does, how well does it fare when compared to ZFS?

I know that a Perkeep node can be run on ZFS but the cluster is only as good as the weakest link. For instance in a disaster scenario where the ZFS node goes completely down, nodes not using ZFS may have experienced silent corruption which would then propagate bad data when being re-synced out. Therefore, it seems to make sense that Perkeep should contain its own bitrot protection scheme.

Timothy C. Quinn
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Received an answer from Brad Fitzpatrick, author of Perkeep:

In Perkeep, every chunk of data and all metadata (which is just more data blobs) is named by its cryptographic digest, which is way stronger than simple filesystem checksum, or no checksums (like many filesystems).

The digests are validated when uploading new data to Perkeep, during replication, and at other times, but we don't really document or have a cohesive policy...

In short, it would seem that Perkeep has the capacity to mitigate against silent corruption failure modes, however, it is not presently an active goal of the project.

Timothy C. Quinn
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