Hello,
I'm looking to use FreeFileSync to detect bit rot.
I have a storage server containing many high-capacity hard drives.
(So I need to do this on a large number of large files, so I'll make a donation if needed to parallelize operations)
I want to regularly run an ffs_batch to perform a bit-by-bit comparison, but without synchronizing anything.
I just want to know which couple of files has the same size + timestamp but is different in its bytes.
And I'd like FFS to generate a log or a CSV file of the different files.
(Then I'll use a PowerShell script to calculate the CRCs of the different files and find the correct one using a JSON database)
Problem: FFS only generates logs for the synchronization operations, not for the comparison.
I can extract the CSV file of the comparison graphically, but how can I do this from the command line?
Best regards,
FreeFileSync and bit-rot detection
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- Joined: 11 Jan 2026
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- Posts: 4867
- Joined: 11 Jun 2019
FFS is not a bitrot detection utility. Sure, you can probably spend enough time hacking together a solution that accomplishes such a thing, but there are tools made for this task specifically. It's one of the great benefits of ZFS and btrfs, among other features. If you have a storage server with many high-cap drives, you should be using a file-system like one of those anyway.
Data corruption is very very unlikely to be caused by bitrot, and much more probable to be caused by something else like RAM issues, drive failures, etc. Proper monitoring of drive health takes care of the largest chance of data integrity issues, multiple backups is what completes it. You could run a bit-comparison once or twice a year to maybe catch a data inconsistency, of which still isn't typically caused by bitrot.
Data corruption is very very unlikely to be caused by bitrot, and much more probable to be caused by something else like RAM issues, drive failures, etc. Proper monitoring of drive health takes care of the largest chance of data integrity issues, multiple backups is what completes it. You could run a bit-comparison once or twice a year to maybe catch a data inconsistency, of which still isn't typically caused by bitrot.