How to enable GlusterFS bitrot detection

Silent data corruption can creep into long-lived storage without an obvious disk error, turning a healthy-looking file into a future incident. Enabling GlusterFS bitrot detection adds an integrity signal so corruption can be flagged early and handled before a file is trusted by applications.

Bitrot detection runs a bitd signer and a scrubber process for a volume, maintaining checksums and periodically verifying stored data against those signatures. Detected mismatches are marked as corrupted and reported in scrub status output, with details written to /var/log/glusterfs/bitd.log and /var/log/glusterfs/scrub.log.

Bitrot detection is enabled per volume and is disabled by default, allowing selective rollout across a cluster. Scrubbing consumes background CPU and I/O, so enabling during a low-traffic window reduces impact; detection identifies corruption but does not automatically repair files, so recovery and replacement procedures should exist before relying on results.

1. Identify the target volume name.

   $ sudo gluster volume list
   volume1

   Replace volume1 with the volume to protect.

2. Confirm the volume is started before enabling bitrot.

   $ sudo gluster volume info volume1
   Volume Name: volume1
   Status: Started
   ##### snipped #####

3. Enable bitrot detection for the volume.

   $ sudo gluster volume bitrot volume1 enable

   Scrubbing adds background I/O and CPU load; enable during a maintenance window for latency-sensitive workloads.

4. Verify that features.bitrot is enabled for the volume.

   $ sudo gluster volume get volume1 features.bitrot
   Option: features.bitrot
   Value: on

5. Check the scrub status for the volume.

   $ sudo gluster volume bitrot volume1 scrub status
   Volume name: volume1
   State of scrub: Active (Idle)
   Scrub impact: lazy
   Scrub frequency: biweekly
   Bitrot error log location: /var/log/glusterfs/bitd.log
   Scrubber error log location: /var/log/glusterfs/scrub.log
   Error count: 0
   Corrupted objects:
   None

   Scrub frequency and throttle depend on the GlusterFS release and cluster policy; tune defaults via the related scrub configuration page when needed.