Files do not last forever. Corruption can be caused by hard drive failures or unreadable compact disks for instance. The files might be partially readable but this does not help much if it is corrupted. There are some ways of preparing yourself against data loss. One obvious way is of course to make regular backups of your important files. But it could of course happen that backups get corrupted as well which most of the time happens in the worst moments possible.
A software that is able to protect your important files against corruption is called ICE ECC which creates so called recovery files that can be used to recover files that are corrupted or partially damaged. They can’t recover files that are not there anymore of course but most of the time you have partial files that can be recovered. This is a like the Par2 file system which I have written about earlier in this week.
ICE ECC offers some advantages over Par2 files. First it is possible to create recovery files for directories with no limitation on file size, amount of files and names. The recovery files themselves are compressed to make it easier to store them on your system. Last but not least some tests that have been published on the developers website claim that ICE ECC is a lot faster than Quickpar for instance. I do not think that this is such an important factor after all unless you create recovery files every day.
Related posts:
Backup important files to FTPCreate Recoverable archives with Quickpar
Par2 Files Explained
Protect Files in Windows by locking them
Zip File Recovery with Object Fix Zip
Recover Deleted Files
Recover Deleted Files
Recover Deleted Files With DiskDigger
… and ZFS is still waaay better. Ha!
:)