Other programs could, accidentally or maliciously, step on the contents of a file. Filesystem checksums are awesome (I use btrfs), but it doesn't protect your file from everything. Hm... maybe a versioned filesystem where you can go back to the "original" version of a file and verify its checksum? :)
Yes, protecting from malicious / accidental modification is a separate problem than protecting from bit rot / gamma rays. The former is obviously much more difficult than the latter. My surprise stems from the fact that common tools are not robust against the latter by now.
(My day job is working with enterprise-grade content-addressed block storage, so maybe I've just set my data-protection expectations too high.)
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Other programs could, accidentally or maliciously, step on the contents of a file. Filesystem checksums are awesome (I use btrfs), but it doesn't protect your file from everything. Hm... maybe a versioned filesystem where you can go back to the "original" version of a file and verify its checksum? :)
Yes, protecting from malicious / accidental modification is a separate problem than protecting from bit rot / gamma rays. The former is obviously much more difficult than the latter. My surprise stems from the fact that common tools are not robust against the latter by now.
(My day job is working with enterprise-grade content-addressed block storage, so maybe I've just set my data-protection expectations too high.)