do you know of any tools for consistency/accuracy? I've been meaning to do some basic md5 checks for all my files but haven't gotten around to it. Every now and then I find a corrupt jpg image that has a rectangular band running through it or something of the like.
Generally I'd recommend using a filesystem designed for that. Something like btrfs or (I think) ZFS, which have checksums built into the filesystem (and if you set them up in a RAID configuration, these checksums can be used to correct data as well)
I believe that's some form of bitrot. AFAIK only ZFS can deal with this (assuming you use ECC RAM).
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, ZFS, Btrfs and ReFS offer strategies to deal with various forms of data degradation, although it appears as if ZFS is still king.
For all my important photos I use par files. Using command-line tools like par2create and par2repair is simply part of the routine of storing photos from the camera on the NAS.
I also use it for music files, in the past too many mp3s got broken.
