Frequent file health check - how to?

  • Hello everyone,


    this is not directly a question about RAID - it's more sort of a question about hard drive health.
    When I migrated from my old storage to the OMV-based NAS I found out that some of the files on the old hard disks weren't readable anymore. The hard drive was healthy, SMART values were fine. I assume some bits or bytes on the old hard drive surface have "died" over the recent years (I ran that storage for about 4 years) without anyone or anything noticing. That happened when I once stored files on that old storage and never read them again. If I had I would have noticed before.
    Of course I ran and run a backup from everything and luckily was able to restore the faulting files. But that backup reads files and folders from the source only when they have been modified in any way. In that particular case the files were once written to the old storage intially, then backed up by the backup routine the next day (as it was detected as new) and from that on never read again for 4 years, neither from its original location nor from the backup location. Well, that's by design I assume.
    I'm worried the live hard drive and the backup drive may have dying bits over the years. That would make a restore impossible if by chance the same files were affected.
    What I'm looking for is some sort of file health check or inspection routine. If one of the same two files (either the original one in its live location or the backed-up one) may die I have the chance to restore. So what I'm lookin for is a frequent read test of all files and folders in the live location.
    At first I thought about turning the backup to fully backup everything again and again which of course includes sort of reading the files from the source but I would like to avoid the senseless writing of huge amount of data to the backup device. Reading seems more harmless to me :)
    Any ideas are highly appreciated!


    Kind regards,
    Sven

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