bitrot 0.4.0

Detects bit rotten files on the hard drive to save your precious photo and music collection from slow decay.

Detects bit rotten files on the hard drive to save your precious photo and music collection from slow decay.

Usage

Go to the desired directory and simply invoke:

$ bitrot

This will start digging through your directory structure recursively indexing all files found. The index is stored in a .bitrot.db file which is a SQLite 3 database.

Next time you run bitrot it will add new files and update the index for files with a changed modification date. Most importantly however, it will report all errors, e.g. files that changed on the hard drive but still have the same modification date.

All paths stored in .bitrot.db are relative so it’s safe to rescan a folder after moving it to another drive.

Performance

Obviously depends on how fast the underlying drive is. No rigorous performance tests have been done. For informational purposes, on my typical 5400 RPM laptop hard drive scanning a 60+ GB music library takes around 20 minutes. On an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD drive bitrot is able to scan a 100 GB Aperture library in under 10 minutes. Both tests on HFS+.

Change Log

0.4.0

• renames are now reported as such

• all non-regular files (e.g. symbolic links, pipes, sockets) are now skipped

• progress presented in percentage

0.3.0

• --sum command-line argument for easy comparison of multiple databases

0.2.1

• fixed regression from 0.2.0 where new files caused a KeyError exception

0.2.0

• --verbose and --quiet command-line arguments

• if a file is no longer there, its entry is removed from the database

0.1.0

• First published version.

Authors

Glued together by Łukasz Langa.