VerifyData™ Silent Data Corruption Detection

Bacula Enterprise Edition has a powerful feature that compares metadata read from the media against that stored in the catalog. Reading the complete stored data can be expensive in terms of network bandwidth, CPU cycles, and storage I/O used. Bacula effectively addresses this issue by using a more effective approach than other solution providers. This is a well balanced approach to ensuring consistency and readability of the backed up data without having to actually read each stored object and processing it on the source system.

Different kinds of File System Integrity checks are performed by Bacula VerifyData. In one example, Bacula implements a verification of the actual file system contents against what was last backed up as a ‘DiskToCatalog’ verification. Just the metadata is compared that is stored in the Bacula Catalog; this  keeps the verifications fast and efficient, as the backed up data does not need to be read from the storage media. Using checksums, file contents changes are likely to be detected. In a second approach, Bacula also keeps track of those files by collecting their metadata in its catalog without actually saving the files, and later compares the system’s files against the cataloged information.