[OpenIndiana-discuss] zpool errors a bit confusing

[Jim Klimov]

On 2014-04-05 04:54, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Can you offer anything that actually shows the files to be as stated?
> Or some way to independently verify them to be in such bad shape?

ZFS reports accesses to corrupt and unrecoverable blocks as IO errors;
if your reads of the files (i.e. "cat $file > /dev/null") succeed
completely then their data is not corrupt, at least not for ZFS level.

Alternately, you can build checksums of this and other copies of your
files and compare the results, see md5sum, sha256sum et al. The tools
to build checksums are available on most platforms, as either part of
openssl, or as perl modules for your scripting, or standalone tools
(many free implementations of md5sum are available for Windows as well).

Note that while many sources suggest to not trust MD5 for communications
since it can be theoretically forged, any hash (and the faster - the
better, or "more portable" is also good) would do for such comparisons
of your own data where nobody malicious could intervene to fake data.

HTH,
//Jim