How does a file get “corrupted” and how can I prevent it?
In: Technology
Digital data is converted into a series of “on’s” and “offs” or 1s and 0s via different very small phenomena. These small bits of storage can be fairly sensitive to outside changes, and sometimes can be flipped to the opposite state almost randomly, or through interactions with very weak particles. The end result can change stored value of a character or number in a file to something else including many nonsensical terms. When the file in turn is read from storage sometimes those errors prevent the file being correctly understood to be opened. For some text files you can often open them into simpler text editors to see all the characters and remove the offending element. Other times you can’t. There are many systems to help automatically correct these errors but they more mitigation strategies than anything else.
For something that has been stored long enough the accumulative collection of these rare and random effects can really make recovery more difficult if not outright impossible. The best ways to store things for long term is to make multiple “pristine” copies and store them separately. When it comes time to read them you have a system to check all of them side by side. Wherever one of them is different from all the others, that’s an error that can be ignored.
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