"What's the worst that's going to happen? Some photo is going to get a single bit error? So what? The data doesn't need super high fidelity." A fact that compl

"What's the worst that's going to happen? Some photo is going to get a single bit error? So what? The data doesn't need super high fidelity." A fact that complicates this argument is the prevalence of compressed data formats. A wrong bit in a photo could corrupt the metadata, or a block of DCT coefficients, such that a whole image block or scan line does not decode, effectively ruining the photo. A wrong bit in a .tar.gz could well corrupt the entire archive. You never know where that bad bit will land. (Yes, this has happened to me -- a single bit flip, probably from RAM error, corrupted a large .tar.gz -- I tracked it down to the bit that changed because I had another copy.)