file-copy corruption

[Motor]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:40:15 +0100, T. Horsnell wrote:

> I'm in the process of moving stuff from our Alpha fileserver onto A
> linux replacement. I've been using gnu-tar to copy filesystems from the
> Alpha to to the Linux NFS-exported disks over a 1Gbit LAN, followed by
> diff -r to check that they have copied correctly (I wish diff had an
> option to not follow symlinks..). I've so far transferred about 3 TiB of
> data (spread over several weeks) and am concerned that during this
> process, 3 files were mis-copied without any apparent hardware-errors
> being flagged. There was nothing unusual about these files, and
> re-copying them (with cp) fixed the problem.
> 
> Are occasional undetected errors like this to be expected? I thought
> there were sufficient stages of checksumming/parity (both boxes have ECC
> memory) etc to render the probability of this to be vanishingly small.

I'd still consider running a good RAM test on both boxes.