Verify Jobs
This document explains the uses of Verify Jobs in Bacula Enterprise. One of them, found in most other backup packages, is used to verify that the data on the backup volumes is actually usable, which is done by reading backup data and checking if it’s intact and matches the cataloged information. The other is the special functionality of Bacula Enterprise to work like a file integrity scanner, finding files that have changed unexpectedly, which might indicate a security issue.
The reader of this paper is expected to have a good understanding of
Bacula in general, i. e. working with the configuration files and
bconsole should be expected. Also, general system administration
knowledge as required for the backed up environment is assumed. The
terminology used with Bacula needs also to be known.
Read more about Verify Jobs functions:
Bacula Enterprise’s Verify Jobs allow not only to ensure integrity of the data written to storage media, but also to ensure that what exists in the file system still matches what was backed up. This feature can be used to detect changes to critical files, that are expected to remain static.
In addition, Bacula Enterprise also allows to run jobs that only, without actually backing up data, check file integrity against information previously collected by Bacula. Being highly configurable and inherently secure, this can be one important building block of an intrusion detection system.
With these features, Bacula Enterprise offers features not found in other backup software, while utilizing its own infrastructure that is required anyway. The area where Bacula Enterprise can be used extends well beyond a plain backup and recovery software into a tool for ensuring data integrity at several levels – not only creating redundancy, managing existing backup copies, and recovering data, but also ensuring data integrity both on its own media and on the source file systems.
Running Verify Jobs and properly tracking the job results can
accordingly become an important part of auditing procedures and allows
system administrators new levels of confidence into their data’s
security.
See also
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