5 ms·
The average user might have no redundancy, but they still ought to have a backup. Checksum failure tells them they need to restore. At the very least, a checks
by radiowave 10y ago
The average user might have no redundancy, but they still ought to have a backup. Checksum failure tells them they need to restore.
At the very least, a checksum failure might tell them (or the tech they're consulting) that they have a data problem, rather than, say, an application compatibility problem.
- XorNot 10y ago"Why is my machine crashing?" "Well, somelib.so is reporting checksum failures" is a much better experience then "weird, this machine used to be great but now it crashes all the time"
- kartickv 10y agosomelib.so what? And what's a "checksum"? Error messages need to be comprehensible to the average user.
- brokenmachine 10y ago"Error: Buy a new Mac."
- kartickv 10y agoAssuming your intent is not to troll: "The file xyz.txt is corrupt. Click here to restore from a Time Machine backup."
- astrange 10y agoMost all executable files are already codesigned, which is a better version of checksums, so it'd only help user data files.
- mindajar 10y agoToday you can verify backups on OS X with "tmutil verifychecksums", at least on 10.11. The UI to this could be improved, but user data checksums don't necessarily need to be a filesystem feature. On a single-disk device, the FS doesn't have enough information to do anything useful about corrupt files anyway.
- vardump 10y ago> On a single-disk device, the FS doesn't have enough information to do anything useful about corrupt files anyway. Some filesystems can be configured to keep two or more copies of certain filesystem/directory/etc. contents. Two copies is enough information to do something useful.