About

Files break. Not often, and usually not all at once, but given enough time and enough storage, the chance of something going wrong increases: a photo opens with a grey band across the bottom, an archive refuses to unpack, a video stutters at the same spot every time. Most people find out long after the damage happened, and by then it's often too late, especially if the damaged file has already been copied over your backups.

We wanted to see what that actually looks like. Not a diagram of a hard drive, not a paragraph about cosmic rays, but a damaged file itself: which bytes changed, what the damage does to a picture, a document, a music file, and why some damage is harmless while a single wrong byte somewhere else can ruin an entire file.

That's what this site is for. It is meant to be a small lab where you can break files on purpose and watch what happens, then see how they can be repaired. For now there's one demo; the rest of the lab is on its way.

What you'll find here

The parity bench shows how recovery data works. Your picture is cut into strips, a few extra "recovery strips" are made from them, and then some of the original strips go missing. You can watch the missing pieces being rebuilt from what's left. It's the same idea behind PAR2 files and RAID, just slowed down enough to follow. Try it.

The Break demo (coming soon) lets you damage a file in different ways and compare the results.

A command-line tool (coming soon) for doing the same experiments on your own machine, open source.

Everything runs in your browser. Pictures you try never leave your device, there's no server that receives, saves or analyzes them, and there is nothing to sign up for.

What it isn't

To be clear: this isn't a repair service, and the demos can't fix your files. They show how damage and repair work, so you can make better choices about protecting the files you care about: keeping more than one copy, checking those copies now and then, and keeping recovery data for the things you can't replace.

Who's behind it

bitrotlab is run by the makers of FileGriffon, a tool that watches your drives and folders for damaged or missing files. A lot of what's here started as experiments while building it. The lab stands on its own, though: you don't need FileGriffon for anything on this site, and the demos explain the ideas, not the product.

Get in touch

Found a mistake, a bug, or have an idea for something to break next? Write to hello@bitrotlab.com.