Athletic Archive Bit Rot Detection: A Fixity and Recovery Checklist
Bit rot is the slow, silent corruption of digital files — and it is one of the least visible threats to a school’s athletic archive. A high-resolution scan of a 1987 state championship game program, a folder of athlete headshots from a decade-old hall-of-fame induction, a video of a 50th-anniversary reunion ceremony: any of these files can degrade at the bit level over months or years without producing a single error message. Staff simply assume the files are intact until someone tries to open them for a recognition event and discovers an image that will not render or a video that plays as noise.
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