[ale] Error Correction [was: Re: is USB stick safer than CD-ROM/DVD]

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Sat 2008-04-26 00:29:01 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:

> The USB stick probably won't have any error correction - a cosmic ray 
> strike can easily flip a bit.  It probably can't flip a bit on a DVD, 
> but even if it did, the inherent error correction ability in the DVD 
> format would almost certainly correct it. 

If the concern is error correction, you could do this on any medium,
by simply storing comparable error-correcting codes (preferably on a
separate physical device for redundancy).  I've never used it, but
http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/ looks like an interesting
implementation of something like that for optical media in particular.

There must be some similar tools that work for arbitrary archives
(everything is a file, after all), but i'm not sure what they are.
Does anyone have any recommendations?

               --dkg
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