Do integrity checks by file comparison really work?

Hello,

I use a program (Beyond Compare) which has a Folder Compare module, with a function for doing a binary comparison between the files inside two folders. I use it to check the integrity of my backups, by comparing my main hard disk files, with the ones on

the backup hard disks. If two files get recognized as being different, then one of them should be corrupt (if they didn't get modified &quotnormally&quot).

My question is: will this method work to detect real file corruptions? Will it detect any kind of corruption, both copy corruptions, and &quotbit rot&quot corruptions? Will there be no problem regarding read cache? I mean: if the first file to compare gets read

from disk, and is kept in a read cache (by Windows or by the hard disk, or by something else), will the second file get read from the same cache (if Windows or the hard disk think they are identical files)? Do Windows and hard disks have some kind of procedure

to detect if a file to read from disk is already available in cache, even if it is in a different folder than the &quotoriginal&quot one? Perhaps some kind of file-checksum-system which decides that the files are same? (And this system would not notice if the file

to compare is corrupt). If this would be true, then integrity checks by file comparison would not work, because in practice the same file would be read twice (first from disk, and then from cache), instead of reading both the two files to be compared from

disk.

I have already done tests by manually &quotcorrupting&quot files (changing slightly the contents, while keeping size and timestamp the same), and it works (the files get recognized as different). But I'm not sure if it will work also with &quotreal&quot corrupt files.

I'm interested mostly about Windows 8 Pro 64bit and NTFS (but would like to know also in general).

Thanks.

View the full article