Backup Validation

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Backup validation is an important measure that should be included in any disaster recovery plan. It allows testing consistency and recoverability of your backups, and also enables you to predict how much it will take to restore files after a data loss event.

We are happy to announce that our software will soon have a new feature of automatic backup validation. Instead of verifying data manually, you will be able to run a validation procedure that will ensure your backups are error free and can be recovered at any time.

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Version 8.5.8 , built on October 31, 2024. 118 MB
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Architecture of Backup Validation

The easiest way to understand how backups will be validated in our software is to take a look at differential backup. Differential backup is a method that allows storing multiple versions of backups in an efficient way. It starts with a full copy of data, and then computes byte-level changes and saves only them. This lets you greatly reduce the amount of disk space required to store backups.

Differential backup

Differential backup: copying byte-level changes

Difference between existing backups and current state of data are computed as follows. Handy Backup splits files into blocks, calculates hash codes (checksums) for each block and determines new ones. Then it performs binary comparison, determines the changes and saves them into files. Technically, this is an implementation of the rsync algorithm.

To validate backups, the software will save the checksums together with backups. The procedure of validation will be as simple as calculating hash codes for backups and making sure they match.



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