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What exactly do you do to verify that whatever you backed up was indeed backed up bit-for-bit and that the backup medium didn't just report success even though
by newscracker 8y ago
What exactly do you do to verify that whatever you backed up was indeed backed up bit-for-bit and that the backup medium didn't just report success even though it didn't get some data stored correctly? Do you verify every backup using some tool? If yes, how long does that take? The reason I ask is because so many sites talk about the benefits of backing up regularly, using backup rotation and retention policies, etc., but they usually don't talk about verification of the backups themselves. Even many popular backup tools don't seem to handle this part (sometimes due to complexity introduced by buffer caches).
- olavgg 8y agoZFS has checksums, so you get a message if some bits are off. Backups has to be verified regulary, there is no exception even with ZFS. For example once a week I fire up a PostgreSQL instance on my remote backup server by cloning one of the snapshots and then I use pg_dump so I also have a "traditional" backup of the database. I do not spend time on verifying this dump though, as the ZFS snapshot already worked fine :-) But I sometimes use the dump to test new hardware or a new PostgreSQL version.
- eslaught 8y agoIt's somewhat basic right now, but I developed a tool that you can use as an additional level of verification that your backups are working. https://github.com/elliottslaughter/integrity-checker https://github.com/elliottslaughter/integrity-checker
- empath75 8y agoIf you haven’t restored your data you aren’t doing backups. At work once I set up data backups, the first thing I do is try and replace the backed up server with a restored server. And you should regularly do that if the data is at all important.