How do you verify a restore?
- by Nic
What tool(s) would you use to verify that a restored file structure is whole and complete? My environment is a Windows Server 2008 file server. (We use tape for backup, but that is inconsequential.)
I am specifically looking for a tool that will:
Record the names of all files and folders below a specified directory
Optionally calculate checksums of each file encountered
Save this index in a human-readable format
Compare the index against restored data and show differences
Some background: I recently had to replace the disks in our file server. The upgrade was scheduled to start 36 hours after the most recent full backup, so I created a differential backup. However, it turns out that one of our applications was clearing the archive bit on files saved to the server, so these were not included in the differential backup. I was unaware of this until my users reported some files as missing.
Aside from this, are there any other common methods for validating the integrity of a restore? I am frequently told that testing backups by restoring them is the only way to know that backups are working, but how do you deal with the case where it works 99% correctly and the other 1% silently fails?
