The challenge with silent data loss is your backups will eventually not have the data either - it will just be gone, silently. After having that happen a few t

The challenge with silent data loss is your backups will eventually not have the data either - it will just be gone, silently. After having that happen a few times (pre-ZFS), I started running periodic find | md5sum > log.txt type jobs and keeping archives. It’s caught more than a few problems over the years, and allows manual double checking even when using things like ZFS. In particular, some tools/settings just aren’t sane to use to copy large data sets, and I only discovered that when… some of it didn’t make it to it’s destination.