si-ghan-bi wrote:Bet let's also say that you are unlucky: I never had problems on TM volumes or HFS+ disks in 6 years

I have owned my short-run publishing company for fourteen years or so and my data is my livelihood. Without it I'm worse than unemployed.
I made the switch to Macs and OS X about six years ago. Before that I ran various iterations of Windows.
As I think through the past fourteen years, there are two types of events that stand out:
- the looks of gratitude on my clients' faces when I deliver their books
- the absolute terror I feel when I discover a problematic file
It's not always my choice what I feel.
Other than a mechanical hard drive crash that I managed to survive only because of sheer and utter stupidity (I had just migrated to a new system and hadn't yet erased my old drives), I
know of three other times I have experienced corrupted hard drive data:
- two requests from clients for reprints of books I had published three and seven years previously
- attempting to migrate a computer from Time Machine
Two of these events have been on HFS+, one on NTFS. This list doesn't include the three times I've had single drives in a RAID-5 set fail where I could reconstruct the entire data set with a new drive.
With data that's up to thirteen years old, it's only a matter of time before I find more occurrences of bit rot that has been perpetuated through several different file systems, hardware setups and operating systems.
In no way am I attempting to be a troll. It appears that you find safety in what you have not experienced, whereas I fear what I may not yet have found...
and when I do find it, it will be too late.Time Machine and HFS+ offer me no proactive way to discern (let alone repair) a post-write failure in the file system.