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+Erasure-coded volumes can suffer **silent disk corruption (bitrot)** that normal serving never notices. EC bitrot detection adds an optional per-volume checksum sidecar so corruption in any shard — including cold parity shards — can be detected and the rebuild path refuses to consume unverified bytes.
+
+## The problem
+
+* **Data shards** (`.ec00`–`.ec09`) are read on the serving path, so corruption in regions that happen to be read is already caught by the per-needle CRC. Padding and unread regions are not.
+* **Parity shards** (`.ec10`–`.ec13`) are **never read during normal serving**. They are only touched during reconstruction, and Reed-Solomon treats every present shard as authoritative — it fills missing shards but does not detect corruption in the shards it reads.
+
+So a parity shard can rot silently for months. The day a data shard is lost and reconstruction runs, the corrupt parity is fed into Reed-Solomon and **silently produces wrong data**.
+
+## How it works
+
+A small sidecar file `<volume>.ecsum` stores a `CRC32C` (Castagnoli, the same polynomial used for needles) for every fixed-size block (default 16 MiB) of every shard. It is wrapped in a self-integrity header (`magic | format_version | payload_len | payload_crc32c`), so a corrupt sidecar is itself detectable and can never be mistaken for shard corruption.
+
+* **Tiny:** about 11 KB for a 30 GB volume.
+* **Optional and backward compatible:** an absent sidecar means "feature off". Older binaries simply ignore the file — no mount failure, safe to roll back.
+
+### At encode time
+
+The checksums are computed inline during the single EC encode pass and written next to the shards. When shards are distributed across servers, the sidecar travels with them.
+
+### Detecting corruption — `ec.scrub`
+
+A new read-only `checksum` mode reads each local shard in blocks and compares it to the sidecar. This is the only path that exercises **cold parity shards**.
+
+```
+ec.scrub -mode checksum
+ec.scrub -mode checksum -volumeId 7 -node 127.0.0.1:8080
+```
+
+A flagged shard is arbitrated by Reed-Solomon: the shard is reconstructed from the other (clean) shards and compared to what is on disk, so a stale sidecar block can never cause a healthy shard to be reported as corrupt. If more than `parity` shards mismatch at once, the sidecar itself is treated as suspect rather than reporting mass corruption. `ec.scrub` is read-only and never deletes anything.
+
+### Safe reconstruction
+
+During rebuild, present input shards are verified against the sidecar and corrupt ones are **excluded from Reed-Solomon and regenerated** (written to a temp file and atomically renamed), then re-verified. This closes the "corrupt parity silently poisons a rebuild" hole.
+
+If the sidecar is present but malformed, the rebuild **fails closed** rather than rebuilding without verification — pass `-unsafeIgnoreSidecar` to override. On any verification failure the rebuild removes every file it generated, so it never publishes bytes it could not verify.
+
+### Backfilling existing volumes
+
+Volumes encoded before this feature have no sidecar. When such a volume is rebuilt on a server that can reach all of its shards, a sidecar is written automatically (trust-on-first-use), so existing volumes become protected over time.
+
+## Configuration
+
+On the volume server:
+
+| Flag | Default | Meaning |
+|------|---------|---------|
+| `-ec.bitrotChecksum` | `true` | Write a `.ecsum` sidecar when generating EC shards |
+| `-ec.bitrotBlockSizeMB` | `16` | Checksum block granularity in MiB (power of two, ≥ 1) |
+
+```bash
+weed volume -dir=/data -ec.bitrotChecksum -ec.bitrotBlockSizeMB=16
+```
+
+## Side notes
+
+* The 10+4 ratio is the default for the open source version.
+* The checksum block size is a uniform overlay on the raw shard bytes; it does not need to align with the 1 GB / 1 MB EC block layout.
+* The [SeaweedFS Enterprise](https://seaweedfs.com/) version adds a **scheduled background scrubber** that continuously verifies cold parity across the fleet with optional auto-repair, ties checksums into the versioned EC vacuum, and provides a coordinator-driven backfill command for protecting existing volumes in bulk.
+
+See also: [[Erasure coding for warm storage]].
diff --git a/_Sidebar.md b/_Sidebar.md
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 * [[Store file with a Time To Live]]
 * [[Failover Master Server]]
 * [[Erasure coding for warm storage]]
+* [[EC Bitrot Detection]]
 * [[Server Startup via Systemd]]
 * [[Environment Variables]]