Latest news

Backups are meant to protect user data. In a typical scenario, backup software runs a job, the data is written to a safe location, and a green check mark appears in the interface to show that everything completed successfully. The user can go to sleep with peace of mind.

The problem is that this green check mark is often the only confirmation that everything is fine.

But what if it is not?

What if the data cannot be restored easily? Or, even worse, what if the data you actually need is not present in the backup at all? Perhaps all the files are there, but the backup contains data that had already been corrupted or encrypted by ransomware before it was backed up.

In all of these cases, the green check mark can still remain green and provide a false sense of security.

These are the kinds of risks backup administrators deal with every day. Their responsibility is not only to make sure that data is written to backups, but also to make sure that the right data is there and, most importantly, that it can be restored safely when it is needed.

Backup software is a little like an airbag in a car. Most of the time, it is invisible and you do not think about it. But when an accident happens, it has to work correctly.

Backups are similar. When a real failure occurs, nobody cares how many green statuses were displayed on the backup job list. What matters is one thing: can the data be restored?

This is why administrators perform restore tests, often in separate test environments. They verify whether a backup can be restored correctly, whether the required data is present, and whether the restored data is in the expected state.

This work is often repetitive, manual, and invisible to end users. At the same time, it is one of the things that helps ensure that a backup will actually be useful when it is needed most.

This is the process we wanted to automate in Bacularis.

In version 6.5.0, we introduced Restore Verification, a feature designed to automate restore testing.

Bacularis can select the required restore point, restore the data to a prepared test environment, run the configured verification checks, and finally report whether the entire test completed successfully.

You can think of the Restore Verification result as a second green check mark - one that a successfully completed backup job alone cannot provide.

The first one says:

"Your backup completed successfully."

The second answers a much more important question:

"Can I actually restore this data?"

That is one of the main goals of Restore Verification: to provide a tool that can regularly verify whether data can really be restored, while also reducing the amount of repetitive manual work involved in performing restore tests.

With this article, we are starting a multi-part series dedicated to Restore Verification in Bacularis.

In the next materials, we will show how to prepare an environment for restore testing, how to configure Rule-based Verification and Native Bacula Verify, and what to check and how to troubleshoot problems when a restore test fails.

We invite you to follow the series. We hope it will help you make better use of Restore Verification and answer one of the most important questions in backup:

Can I really restore my data?