How does bitrot work?
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Bitrot is a general term for memory cells in a storage medium breaking from wear and tear.
The actual reasons can be very diverse, dust, heat, EM radiation and so on.
When that happens a memory cells content isn’t reliably correct anymore, for example the cell can be locked into 0 despite having been written a 1 before.
This happens quite rarely, but when it happens it can be catastrophic depending on what was saved there. Therefore techniques are used to recognize broken cells and rewrite the data into an intact cell instead. One way to do that are checksums. Every X cells your write their digital sum so if some cell is incorrect the sum doesn’t fit anymore you can immediately see something is wrong in this section.
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