binary file formats: need for error correction?

Posted by Jason S on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jason S
Published on 2010-05-27T13:30:28Z Indexed on 2010/05/27 13:31 UTC
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robustness

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error-detection

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binary-file

I need to serialize some data in a binary format for efficiency (datalog where 10-100MB files are typical), and I'm working out the formatting details. I'm wondering if realistically I need to worry about file corruption / error correction / etc.

What are circumstances where file corruption can happen? Should I be building robustness to corruption into my binary format? Or should I wrap my nonrobust-to-corruption stream of bytes with some kind of error correcting code? (any suggestions? I'm using Java) Or should I just not worry about this?

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