[Emp3r0r]

I didn't propose using 150 megs megs worth of parity information, just a small amount. Is this not possible? For example, you have a lump of data, say 725 megs big... you decide to add 25 megs of error recovery. That would make 29 25meg seperate sections of data (30 overall). so if maybe you get a scratch in the middle that corrupts just one 25 meg section of data, you could run a little proggy that would use the error correction data and spit out your original 725 meg file.

@Koepi: maybe I don't know what I'm talking about (which is highly likely) but I don't see why the concept couldn't be applied for sensitive backups. BTW, i know the concept of parity checking is really really old, but the way the release groups are using it for newsgroups is new afaik, well at least in the last 5 or 6 years new. I haven't downloaded anything from newsgroups since Windows(96) Nashville.