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Cake day: Aug 14, 2023

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The Wikipedia article has these relevant quotes from the court opinion:

The question is thus whether the Betamax is capable of commercially significant noninfringing uses … one potential use of the Betamax plainly satisfies this standard, however it is understood: private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home.[7] […] [W]hen one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work… and that time-shifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge, the fact… that the entire work is reproduced… does not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use.[8]


In 1984, this issue made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately decided that recording television to tape using a VCR for personal use (“timeshifting”) is fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.




This is what I use, will work with any filesystem (it writes hashes in hidden/dot files) and on any OS as long as Python is available: https://pypi.org/project/chkbit/

It runs ahead of my nightly backup. If it fails, the backup won’t proceed.

Edit: Because the script relies on hashing files, it uses tons of both disk IO and CPU when it runs, but the tradeoff is worthwhile to me.


Nightly automated runs of the chkbit script is the only thing that alerted me to the fact that either the SSD or storage controller in my Mac Mini had issues and was corrupting data. I was very thankful to have already had the automation in place for that exact scenario.

It theoretically shouldn’t be necessary for filesystems that have built-in checksumming.