4 ms·

Out of curiosity, what in the file format makes it particularly vulnerable to corruption?

• mangamadaiyan 5y ago
  A little googling threw up this link: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html I haven't read through the link properly, so I'm as yet unable to comment on the merits of xz or the lack thereof; posting it here for other readers who might be curious, as I was.
  • walrus01 5y ago
    I can't say that I've ever seen a corrupt xz file that wasn't in a place where a bzip2 or lzip or anything else wouldn't have also been hosed (a very thoroughly failed ext4fs file system on a dying hard drive).
    • bombcar 5y ago
      It could be a situation where it's "how bad are you hosed" - for example a bit flipping in a text document can pretty easily be fixed by hand (though it could be completely missed, and critical to be sure) - but a compressed format could either recover losing a "sector" or so, or simply be impossible to restore anything from it. There's an argument that you're better off knowing you lost data than having most but with a hidden flaw - but either way you want multiple copies and preferably in a format that contains error detection AND correction - and itself is stored on a filesystem that provides similar (ZFS for example).