Windows Rot (bit Rot)
 

my older computer has slowed down verr badley....the AVs cant find anything nor can ad-awarese , drive is 75 % free space , defragmenting dident do sh!t. everything is fine but its still extremely slowed down . it has done this befor ....and i have to reinstall windoze to restore the speed and power , about every 6 months or so this cycle repeats itself. upon further reaserch and consulting my friends in the one of the ares pc help chatrooms ,iv found out that this is common for windose...google sead that it is when windows just degrades for no reson and gets so shakey it must be reformatted/reinstalled roughley every 6 months or so. google & othor sites sead allsow that windows is the onley OS that dose this, MAC and linux supposedley dont do it. however my friend from the chatroom (he sez hes a network administrator or somthing so im assuming hes right) sead that ALL OSs do this AND that data files eg music, video, text etc will "wear out" and "fade" or othorwize get corrupted and go south over time and with use too along with the OS. i am hopeing my friend/aquantence is wrong about the data file part atleast. this scares the shi* out of me .


has anybody els ever herd of this "bit rot" and has anybody ever seen it happen?? and is there a way to prevent or reverse it?

i can live with reinstalling the os every 6 months but if my large music colection and photos/home movies are doomed...why is it agen that we even bother with computers??
i think this is verry serious so please no smartazz coments mr ____(you know who you are)

I have a 13 yr old mac & the files seem to be fine on that. It's never had a re-installation or any kind of change since it was purchased. Still the same HDD.

It is apparently true that all digital storage formats do wear out. At least it's arguably better than non-digital formats however. And they are also susceptible to static, UV, magnetic interference!, etc.

What you do need to consistently do on windows machines is defragment your HDD's. And yes a fragmented HDD will slow your comp down considerably. This was also true for the older macs using older mac os's. But it doesn't seem to be the case for mac osx. There's other issues re: mac osx. Also a windows HDD that's almost full will slow down the system. AFAIK

By the way, there's ways of optimising your system & getting rid of unnecessary files. This may mean start up files (during system startup), registry, etc. Google about this (optimising your system.) I'm no windows expert (or about anything for that matter), so I can only offer simple advice re: your problem.

Digital Media
 

Dear CRT

If you want to keep your data files permanently, i.e. for the next 20 - 40 years, you must burn them onto reputable CD/R disks.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, it will wear out, burn out or fall apart with use and, as LOTR said, our computers are prone to various forms of electrical interference.

Therefore, if you want some form of permanence you must put your music collection, digital photos and home movies onto CD/R disks (not CD/RW).




UK Bob

Hi CRT

I have not suffered the nature of the problem you are discussing here, but I have had to reformat my hdd several times through my own neglect.

By neglect I mean d/l something that has corrupted the OS or by messing with the registery and deleting something I wasn't supposed to. In both instances mentioned I had to reformat and reinstall the OS. It is a pita on this machine.

One thing I have noticed on this machine is that when the hdd gets down to 20% free space left it starts slowing down big time. I have learned through research and googling that windows based systems need 15% free hdd space to function.

But as mentioned by LOTR and ukbobboy01 those are the best steps to keeping your machine and operating system healthy.

CRT wrote:
Either you horribly misunderstood him or he is telling nonsense. Digital data cannot "wear out" or "fade". If you notice any corruption that's most likely a hardware failure.

Mr. I've Not A Chance Of Being Counted....

Listen-up dick-head...

Mr. Tube, for all of his various and amusing madness, actually does ask questions that bear on some reality vis a vis p2p world, whereas your routine garbage does not...

So...


Perhaps you could shut-up for a bit and actually learn from your betters...


Additionally, you are cruisin' for a bruisin' for a COMPLETE i.p. ban here... Then, if that does not make you 'behave', we bring in the heavy-squad and you are then absolutlely denied access here within these august Gnutellaforums... (and maybe a bit more denial, huh ?)
In other words of other words.... You be good, you here ? Or, you be off. OFF as in OFF.
Up to you, dumbo...

If you want to continue to participate here in GF and maybe even provide benefit for other users, GREAT !
If not, you is toast.

Understand, young one... I have not been 'involved' previously in any of your horse's *** posts.... BUT, NOW I AM !

Me is ON WATCH, junior. OK ?

And, I am not alone.

Ming The Moderator can measure your hat size via the net, let alone know EVERYTHING about you... He has a "girlfriend" who can tell how often you change you underpants and exactly what colour they must be BEFORE you do change them !!!

This lovely lady can do ANYTHING she wants re: YOU...
And we only need to make the slightest 'request'...

You are NOT ALONE, my child.

Be Good, huh, dear ?

Dear ursula,

do you abuse this thread to send private message to me? Otherwise, please tell me what in the above post of mine could be used against me.

Furthermore, if I had written this:
I'm rather sure you or the mysterious Mr Ming would have deleted my post. Looks like some are more equal than others.

Sincerely,
I_Have_No_Account

Having a very good idea exactly who and what you are and were...

Well... It's going to be fun, isn't it, chuckles ?

ta ta

ursula, you speak in riddles.

It can and it does.

You can only rewrite a sector of your hard drive so many times until it will start losing your data and you can only store data for a limited amount of time until it is lost.

There is always a one in a million or one in a billion chance that a file you wrote to your new harddrive has been corrupted while writing it and you just didn't notice it.

It is a very bad idea to call this kind of corruption "fade" or "wear out". Furthermore, what you write is so general that it's true by definition but carries virtually no information.
The sun will destroy earth in a few billion years and the universe will presumly collapse somewhen.

If you are that easy with throwing big numbers, please stay away from them. What you are doing is not arguing.

I see one way how Microsoft Windows would really incrementally corrupt the whole disk: Excessive defragmentation. If you do not use ECC RAM and most PCs don't, there's of course a chance that data is corrupt in transit.

Data in disk sectors doesn't "fade" either. Either the sector can be read or it cannot be read which causes a failure. There's no fuzzy state in-between that would justify a word like "fade". You can take it for granted that a harddisk will fail completely very soon after you notice some read or write errors. These are also hard errors, not something the OS can miss.

However, please look at the initial question resp. problem. The person complained that his computer gets very slow after some months and a fresh installation fixes this. This is a typical Windos problem which is caused by a bloated registry, disk fragmentation and dubious software running in the background which was installed as a gimmick or extra along with other software.

Suddenly the topic changes to data that seems to "wear out" or "fade". Keep in mind that he was initially also talking about a 6 months cycle. You see, there are two topics with nothing in common mixed into one.

No, it's not. The difference is that every write operation has a certain chance of failing and every day there is a certain chance, your hard drive loses information.

With the sun, there is no chance at all that it will destroy the earth in a million or a billion years. Plus, the universe won't collapse. Someday it will just stop expanding and stay that way (at least that's what recent experiments suggest).

You can even ask the company producing the harddrive how probable it is that information is lost. They usually keep very accurate statistics about that kind of errors.

I have lost more than one harddrive that way. Usually it starts with recoverable errors, e.g. the harddrive needs more than one attempt to read a single block, but once that happens the probability of losing more blocks grows very quickly and it usually doesn't really matter how old the harddrive is when that happens, - although the higher the load on the harddrive has been, the more probable it is...

Wrong, there is this fuzzy state. In a problematic block on your harddrive the data you read may change everytime you read it. It's a little complicated to explain, without going into details on how data is stored on the harddrive and what is used to read it but you can compare it to an old record that was played too many times. The sound just isn't as clear and brilliant anymore and you have to pay really a lot of attention to understand the lyrics.

Well, I_Have_No_Account

Here is a little piece of trivia for you and an experiment ONLY you might want to try. I wouldn't suggest others try this, as you will probably have to replace your hdd. Take and open up your computer so you can see your hard disk drive. Make a backup copy of your hard disk drive. You will need it! Then take a magnet and slowly move it accross your hard disk drive.

Once you have done this see if your computer can read your hard disk drive. I am almost certain it won't be able to, as your digital data is magneticaly encoded on your hard disk drive.

This gets to what CRT was asking about, and trap_jaw4 was relating to.

Yes theoretically and realisticly digital data can fade "lose it's magnetism".

Point made, do what you wish with I_Have_No_Account, ursula, provided I_Have_No_Account didn't do the experiment.

If I_Have_No_Account did do the experiment...

I hope this answered your question on how and why this might happen CRT.

If you explain that much, that's fine because it's sufficiently detailed to show that these kind of problems are not related to his 6 monthly reinstall cycle.

Ok, Fabion, you call complete lossage "fade"? You mean CRT goes through his computer with a big magnet? I doubt that.
You do understand the difference between a physical rotting media and bit rot, don't you? Are you trying to imply that I claimed the data would survive a physically damaging media?

The problem here is, that everybody agrees with anyone while any of those is actually talking and thinking about completely different things.

I_Have_No_Account

you fail to see the point whether you physically do it or it happens over time. Items that are magnetised lose there magnetism over time. This happens naturaly.

nobody reely ansered the ? a was asking : what causes windows to corrupt itself and slow down, EVEN when the drive is 75% free AND is defragmented reularley AND when the system is suposedley virus and spyware free???? PS i allsow tride using REGISTRY REPAIR and that didet do anything for my speed.


ok ? # 2 : my music and stuff is on a compleatley seperate HDD from the one windows lives on. i know there safe from windows system failures there , but are they safe from this "bit rot" (by bit rot i dont meen phisical problems with the drive like head crashes and letting a magnet/transformer etc get too close) i meen can the files simpley corrupt themselfs just from being read and from sitting there on the drive for 10-20 years?

can simpley moving the files from folder to folder on the same drive corrupt them??

and can a HDD degrade the same way older style magnetic tape can???

i read somware that it takes a magnet (nomal fridge magnet type) 20000years to lose its magnetisem. HDDs are made differantley than tapes so the magnetic particals should be more robust than that on a tape and should last much longer than a tape . so can a HDD be much more differant than a fridge magnet life span wize??? (magnetic lifespan of the data itself ,not the bearings or motor lifespan witch is obviousley less) (and of corse assuming it is not expozed to a magnetic feilds)

There are several possibilities:
- Buggy drivers
- Buggy windows
- Buggy hardware
- Buggy end-user software

I answered that:
- Disk fragmentation
- Bloated registry; this doesn't mean it's corrupt, just that it contains a vast amount of (very often unused) entries.
- Unnecessary background programs

You can only show that there's a virus, there's no tool to show that there is NO virus. Well, there's a way but it is hardly practicable.

10 years sounds reasonable for a harddisk lifetime. 20 years sounds risky. The problem is that old hardware from the 80s or even older often works fine. Most electronic problems are caused by bad capacitors and sometimes fine rifts in electronic boards. Old disks and tapes stored data less dense and the used materials were better known and understand than some of the modern materials used. Usually, old hardware and media are much more robust whereas high-end stuff is comparatively sensitive.

However, especially harddisks are highly "intelligent". So you can monitor them and most of the time replace them before they fail. This feature is called "SMART" and there are certainly tools for Windos which can use this to diagnose problems and tell you the current status of your disk. Of course, that helps with disks in-use only.

If your drive supports power management to turn the drive off when not in use, you should disable it by all means. The most critical event for a harddisk is spin-up/spin-down and stresses it the most. There's a very simple rule that applies to almost all materials: Frequent drastic temperature changes
make things brittle and thus destroy it in the end. A drive that runs 24/7 is much less stressed than one in a computer which is switched on/off several times a day.

Every write-access can (in theory) cause damage to the files due to the reasons given above and explained by others. You can detect this only by keeping checksums for every file around. For example, I always take the time to compare a burned CD with the original data on disk after I once burned some CD-RWs with a defect surface without getting any error from the burner.
I don't see any evidence that mere read-access could cause anything like that.

If you really move files from one folder to another in contrast to moving them to a different partition, coruption should be fairly unlikely as this causes only some changes in the directory entries. That's why this operation works in an instant.

In any case, it's by far more likely that you use data by viruses or accidential deletion than by "bit rot".

Certainly. A HDD contains a bazillion of very very small "magnets" only a few atoms in size. The disk might still work fine due to redundancy and/or error correcting codes even if
a good amount of those little magnets lose their magnetism or flip but sooner or later too much of them will fail and render the disk useless.

Your fridge magnet will probably still work fine with a few magnetism left.

You should check your the website of your HDD vendor. They tell you detailed specs of any model. My drive, for example, is "designed for 5 years". Incidently, as a rule of thumb, I wouldn't trust any media more than 5 years.