What is your process for automating this checksum twice a year? Does it give you a text file dump with the absolute paths of all files that fail checksum for inspection? How often does this failure happen for you?
All my drives are Linux ext4 and I just run this program on every file in a for loop. It calculates a checksum and stores it along with a timestamp as extended attribute metadata. Run it again and it compares the values and reports if something changed.
These days I would suggest people start with zfs or btrfs that has checksums and scrubbing built in.
Over 400TB of data I get a single failed checksum about every 2 years. So I get a file name and that it failed but since I have 3 copies of every file I check the other 2 copies and overwrite the bad copy. This is after verifying that the hard drive SMART data shows no errors.
> What is your process for automating this checksum twice a year?
Backup programs usually do that as a standard feature. Borg, for example, can do a simple checksum verification (for protection against bitrot) or a full repository verification (for protection against malicious modification).
