Fixity First: Making Checksums a Core Part of Your Metadata Strategy

Fixity is core metadata that must travel with the object from its first breath to its centennial birthday. If you treat checksums like a sidecar, they’ll fall off the motorcycle the moment you hit a pothole. A fast, non-cryptographic checksum like xxHash64 or CRC32C has an astronomically low false-positive rate for random media flips. Use cryptographic hashes (SHA-256/512) whenever you’re publishing or exchanging outside your boundary.