[hughrr]

I keep my stuff in files only carefully categorised in directories. I use Beyond Compare to do a byte level comparison between what’s on my disk and what’s on the (one of the several disconnected) backup volumes I use. That identifies corruption issues at either side of the fence.

I lost about a year of family photos thanks to this sort of issue once so I am very wary of problems.

[bawana]

We use beyond compare to do the same for a vast set of municipal documents. We periodically update the collection with new documents. Beyond compare shows shows the new documents as blue(orphans) in the working directory. Interestingly, we occasionally see a red document in the backup indicating a differences the byte level. The documents appear the same in the word processor so we don’t know what’s going on. These are windows boxes and a symbology nas (smb) so no apple involved.

[hughrr]

Might be time stamp or metadata changes in the files if someone opens them. I’ve seen that with some MS office products.