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Sysadmins usually know ServerSpec, a tool allowing to check if your servers are correctly configured. The use of automated deployment tools makes deployments easier and easier, but lot of unexpected situations can come up using this tool, especially when more and more servers are implied. ServerSpec allows to verify that the result of your deployments are what you were expecting for and that no exception or unexpected event goes undetected.
Backup Checker (Github stars appreciated :)) offers the same kind of controls, but for your backups. Once you have backups, you don’t know if they contain what you are expecting for. And this is especially important because having broken backups mean losing your data after a major outage! Moreover if you think you are well protected with backups but they are eventually broken (corrupted archives, archives being filled with empty files, saving useless files…), you will perform your server or database upgrades without being really protected, leading to terrible situations.
Backup Checker on github
Backup Checker offers lots of controls over backups:
- check if an archive is corrupted
- control if some files or directories exist inside an archive exist
- check if a file size inside an archive is not null or has a specific size (operators smaller than, equals, greater than supported)
- owner, group, uid, gid of files/directories inside an archive
- and a lot more. Check the official documentation!
Use Backup Checker with Backup-Manager or Rsnapshot
Starting from Backup Checker 1.7,if you use a backup tool like Backup-Manager or Rsnapshot, you’ll be glad to know that Backup Checker perfectly works with them. The documentation is available on the Backup Checker Community page with the howtos to install and configure Backup Checker with Backup-Manager or with Rsnapshot.
What about you? Let us know in the comments what you think of Backup Checker and its features to connect with other backup tools. We would be happy to get your feedbacks about how you use Backup Checker or what you expect from a backup checking solution.