[conductor]

Thanks for the article and code.

Also check out https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline

I wish something like this was integrated into a modern and free archive format. RAR has it. RAR also got volume recovery: when creating split multi-volume archives you can also create recovery volumes - each recovery volume can replace any other one missing volume. It was a life-saver in floppy-disk times.

[dale_glass]

We're not using floppies anymore, and media is extremely reliable.

On the internet you can just retransmit if something went wrong, and if you're worried about the media specifically then there are media specific measures, like RAID and filesystem level checksums.

[macintux]

Cosmic rays are a thing, and wasn’t there just a study linked here a few days ago about how unreliable hardware is at scale?

[dale_glass]

Oh, I'm all for ECC and checksumming and whatnot.

All I'm saying is that adding recovery info to archives is probably not ideal -- we can do it in a task or media specific way that works best for whatever context the data is in.

Redundancy in .RAR made perfect sense back when you were transporting data on floppies, and if the floppy was bad, it was a huge pain. These days we transport over the network and don't need to carry any redundant data at all. All we need is a checksum and to retransmit whatever didn't arrive correctly.