[H-GEN] Lightweight alternative to Tripwire?

[Benjamin Fowler]

Hello,

Here's some more fun with my home server setup. After replacing a bad
disk, it occurred to me, that because I'm not running ZFS or have ECC
memory, I don't have much of a way to detect silent data corruption.
Backing up isn't an issue here; it's the annoyance of random files
turning bad when I'm not looking -- and having them find their way
into my backups which concerns me here...

Most of the data I have, (e.g. movie and CD rips, MAME ROMs,
whatever), I don't care about too much -- if I discover silent
corruption when I go to use it, I can re-rip/re-download, or whatever.
However, some stuff is irreplaceable, and if I get by random errors,
even a single bit error in my wedding photo collection, I'm going to
be pretty annoyed, especially if said silent data corruption finds its
way into my backups.

For this little problem, I use Tripwire. But there's two problems:

1) Tripwire is industrial-strength, paranoid security software, and is
thus massive overkill for what I'm doing.
2) I want to check my only data monthly (say, alongside my monthly
scrub). I'm not sure I want to effectively scrub my disk array nightly
and excessively wear my cheap WD green drives.

Should I stop complaining, and just use Tripwire, but only for my
really important stuff, like wedding photos? Are there alternatives?
Or should I do what a mate of mine did, and write something completely
bespoke to generate/check MD5sums of my data and run this
periodically?

Thoughts?

Cheers, Ben.