![Erasure](https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/docs/screenshots/erasure-code.jpg?raw=true)

## What is Bit Rot protection?

Bit Rot, also known as data rot or silent data corruption is a data loss issue faced by disk drives today. Data on the drive may silently get corrupted without signaling an error has occurred, making bit rot more dangerous than a permanent hard drive failure.

relying on apocryphal or anecdotal advice.

[MinIO Commercial Licensing](https://min.io/pricing) is the best option for applications that trigger AGPLv3 obligations (e.g. open sourcing your application). Applications using MinIO - or any other OSS-licensed code - without validating their usage do so at their own risk....

export MINIO_KMS_SECRET_KEY=my-minio-key:OSMM+vkKUTCvQs9YL/CVMIMt43HFhkUpqJxTmGl6rYw=
```

> You can choose an arbitrary name for the key - instead of `my-minio-key`.
> Please note that losing the `MINIO_KMS_SECRET_KEY` will cause data loss
> since you will not be able to decrypt the IAM/configuration data anymore.
For distributed MinIO deployments, specify the *same* `MINIO_KMS_SECRET_KEY` for each MinIO server process.