I am quite worried about losing information and not being able to recover it from the backups, so I am trying to nail the best automated way to make sure the backups are good.

Restic comes with a check command, that according to the documentation here has this two “levels”:

  • Structural consistency and integrity, e.g. snapshots, trees and pack files (default)
  • Integrity of the actual data that you backed up

In plain words, I understand this as: The data you uploaded to the repository is still that data.

Now my question is, do you think this is enough to trust the backups are right? I was thinking about restoring the backup in a temporary location and running diff on random files to check the files match the source, but I don’t know if this is redundant now.

How do you make sure you can trust your backups?

  • BCsvenEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Deja DUP has auto validation also. But besides “backup” I think everyone suggests using ZFS that auto heals bit rot. And don’t trust unplugged SSDs, they can suffer bit rot quickly if stored in a hot location