Self-healing archive file format with redundancy

Solution 1:

Dar at http://dar.linux.free.fr/ support's parity and a bunch of other options.

As for if it's still worth it? I make 2 copies of everything I back up, and a 3rd for super important stuff (tax returns, mortage stuff, etc). One on an NAS for easy access and 1 on DVD for long term storage. The 3rd copies tend to make their way into my fire safe on DVD in a nice case to prevent scratching.

It comes down to the value of the data your saving.

Solution 2:

I usually use par2 when dealing with somewhat large (>100MB) files. The extra amount of processing time is worth peace of mind and not that noticable.

Solution 3:

For large volumes I dont think its worth the extra processing overhead of creating parity bits.

Just go with the rule of keeping 'it' in multiple places, disks are cheap, the internet clouds are here, online storage is abundent.

Where possible store on 2 different technologies. In the case that some strange airbourne fungus wipes out all your DVD's you may still be able to recover data from say a disk or online.