From experience, as I said, I had bitrot on EXT4, with carefully versioned backups, but it didn't help, since the bitrot was just faithfully propagated through

From experience, as I said, I had bitrot on EXT4, with carefully versioned backups, but it didn't help, since the bitrot was just faithfully propagated through all the backups (I didn't have 5+ year backups - who knows when the bitrot occurred). And I haven't experienced file corruption in the 5+ years I've used ZFS. Of course, ZFS isn't a magic bullet that solves all ills, but I've been very happy with it. I still, of course, have multiple backups of important data, but now I'm more confident about the integrity of those backups.