Verification of reliability and integrity of backups

[Riot Nrrrd™]

Hello,

At my work we were recently written up by auditors because even though we have Bareos backing up our systems, we had no proof of the "validity and reliability of the [Bareos] backups".

Does Bareos have any built-in checks to verify the validity and reliability of the on-disk backups it creates, that I could use as ammo against these auditors and their evaluation?

Thanks!

[Miguel Santos]

If it is an auditor that is requesting this information, most likely they want to see that you are able to restore data from the backups, and that the recovered data is actually useful from a business perspective.

There is no tool for doing that other than doing a couple of restores yourself and testing your data, because it depends on all the applications you are running at your organization and how detailed you were with your analysis of the data to be backed up and your plan to restore.

In BareOS, there are some things you can do, like this: https://docs.bareos.org/Appendix/VerifyFileIntegrityWithBareos.html and https://docs.bareos.org/Configuration/Director.html#config-Dir_Job_VerifyJob but that compares the files you specified in your backup. It does not mean that the data is useful, from the auditor's perspective.

Good luck.

[Frank Kohler]

On 9/6/24 08:26, Miguel Santos wrote:
> If it is an auditor that is requesting this information, most likely
> they want to see that you are able to restore data from the backups, and
> that the recovered data is actually useful from a business perspective.
>
> There is no tool for doing that other than doing a couple of restores
> yourself and testing your data, because it depends on all the
> applications you are running at your organization and how detailed you
> were with your analysis of the data to be backed up and your plan to
> restore.
>
> In BareOS, there are some things you can do, like
> this: https://docs.bareos.org/Appendix/VerifyFileIntegrityWithBareos.html and https://docs.bareos.org/Configuration/Director.html#config-Dir_Job_VerifyJob but that compares the files you specified in your backup. It does not mean that the data is useful, from the auditor's perspective.
>
> Good luck.

Thanks Miguel! In addition: for organizations we (as bareos company)
offer 'bareos health check' where we can actually verify the
installation, backup strategy & goals (and the restore test ;-))
If interested contact me directly or use contact form on website.


best,
Frank