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by seba_dos1 11 days ago
I just had the first case of a file not being copied correctly after using rsync that I noticed a few days ago. It was a raw image file so it was visually noticeable, some lines of pixels just went black. It may be unrelated, it may not have even been rsync's fault, but this drama and timing just makes me wonder if I got clauded there.
2 comments

Related: I'm writing a file-format validator whose first focus is on image data.

https://validate.pics

Also related: I'm using LLM assistance to write it, but I also have a test suite that proves it's working (I call it the "shotgun" suite: given a good image file, it first flips a random bit ("sniper"), then a random byte ("boltgun") and then a random 4096 byte segment which is the typical sector size ("shotgun"); each time it tries to validate the file by decoding it fully, and records what percentage of time it is detected at each scope, and it collects statistics about this over hundreds of times.)

The point of it is to detect things like corrupt data and bitrot... across 240+ different filetypes so far... since no other tool really exists yet in this space to do that.

Note that some formats, notably Apple's HEIC, are so data-dense that corruption only results in undetectable image corruption (well, a human would notice it, but an algorithm cannot!) So I have ANOTHER app coming to help with that which does detection AND repair (to a point). ;)

The CLI will be free and open-source, but I'm also writing a for-sale-in-future private-source GUI for it.

Do you not do the md5 or sha hashes of the copied zip file?
That's ... what rsync is supposed to do for you.
zip file?...

I was syncing photos from my phone.