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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I think Nikon and Canon's past cameras had signed photos by default, and you could get the software for verification if you're a police dept or similar.

Both manufacturer's keys got extracted from their cameras, rendering the feature moot. Now, a more robust iteration is probably coming, possibly based on secure enclaves.

I'd love to have the feature and use it to verify that my images are not corrupted on disk.

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Used to work on archival. You want to store your images in TIFF and use FEC if you really care. That withstands significant bitrot. Signing will just tell you that the image is broken but not allow you to recover it. You can do fine with SHA256 and 3-2-1 backup.

Thanks for the heads-up, didn't know TIFF/FEC. However, I can't because the images are .ARW (Sony's camera raw format). I keep multiple copies with hashes of them currently. I check the disks periodically.

Mid-term plan is to build an UNRAID array with patrolling. Will probably do backups with Borg on top of it, and keep another "working copy", so I have multiple layers of redundancy with some auto-remediation.

UNRAID will keep disk level consistency in good shape. Patrolling will do checksum tests, Borg can check its own backups against bitrot and can repair them in most cases. Working copy will contain everything and refill if something unthinkable happens.

You have to convert to an archival format from whatever your raw format is. The issue with raw files is that they are compressed so any bitrot in those leads to more than just losing a pixel or two here or there but sometimes the entire file. TIFF is not compressed at all. FEC allows single pixel corrections to be done accurately. We had a metric shit ton of LTO tapes, changers and online disk cache that handled all that.

I don't do that at home. I have 600GB of Nikon raws. I keep one copy on my Mac. I have a time machine backup in the house (in another room) on an Samsung T7 shield and I have an off site backup which is a quarterly rsync job to another Samsung T7 shield.

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