On Mon, 30 Jun 2014 18:21:06 Noah O'Donoghue wrote:
> My current setup is a Ubuntu laptop, with 2 external drives.
> 
> 1X 2TB ext4 for data storage
> 1X 3TB ext4 for backup (using Crashplan commercial backup software).
> 
> My question, is if I change the first drive to btrfs or ZFS, will I gain
> resiliency from bitrot?

BTRFS in a default configuration will use "dup" for metadata.  So a bad 
metadatablock can be corrected.  But a bad data block causes data loss - at 
least you know you have data loss (as opposed to silent data corruption on 
older filesystems).

ZFS has one more copy of metadata than of data.  If you have 1 copy of data 
(the default) then you have 2 copies of metadata.  If you want protection 
against read errors or data corruption on a dingle disk with ZFS you can use 
the "copies=" option to use multiple copies.  The number of copies of metadata 
blocks is 1 greater than the number of copies of data.  The copies= option can 
be set on a per "filesystem" (where a ZFS "filesystem" is like a subdirectory 
on a traditional filesystem) basis.

> My understanding is I need 2 drives in at least a RAID 1 to get automatic
> healing from bitrot,

No, "dup" for BTRFS metadata and "copies=" for data on ZFS give you this on a 
single disk.

> but if I at least use a filesystem with check summing
> support then I will be able to at least restore my affected files from my
> Crashplan backups (which are compressed then checksummed and regularly
> checked for errors automatically) and I won't have the risk of my main
> drive corrupting my backups, because the read will FAIL if it doesn't pass
> the checksum.

Yes.

-- 
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