File Integrity 6: Which image format is most resilient?
In general, most compressed file formats don&#x27;t even bother to be resilient against errors, since error correction mostly runs against the point of compression (to make files as small as possible). Some file formats do have error detection - for example, PNG provides a CRC-32 of every chunk, and compressed formats like Zip and gzip have similar checksums.<p>If you happen to know (or guess) that a compressed file with a checksum only has 1-2 bytes in error, it is definitely possible to recover the original file through bruteforce. You can probably even do this to a file without a checksum just by testing which possibilities parse correctly.<p>However, corruption on filesystems rarely takes the form of a small number of bytes; oftentimes the file&#x27;s metadata gets corrupted such that entire blocks of the file (anywhere from 512 bytes to 64KB) are swapped, dropped or lost. Instead of worrying about corruption-resistant image formats (since storing everything as uncompressed TIFF&#x2F;BMP is incredibly wasteful), it&#x27;s probably worth using a more corruption-resistant filesystem instead (i.e. not FAT!).