Comment Par2 and Reed-Solomon (Score 1) 321
Bitrot does happen.
When a disk has a bad block and detects that, it will try to read the data from it and put it on a block from the reserve-pool. However, the data might be bad and corrupt, so you lose data.
Disks do have a Reed-Solomon (aka par-files) index, so it can repair some damage, but it doesn't always succeed.
Anyway, what I do for important things, is have par2 blocks that go along with the data. All my photo-archives have par2 files attached to them.
I reckon you could even automate it. To have a script that traverses all directories and tries to repair the data if it's broken. If it fails, you get notified.