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Unverified backups are useless, every sysadmins know that. But manually verifying a backup means wasting time and resources. Moreover it’s boring. You should automatize it!
Charlie Chaplin Modern Times
Backup Checker is a command line software developed in Python 3.4 on GitHub (stars appreciated 🙂 ) allowing users to verify the integrity of archives (tar, gz, bz2, lzma, zip, tree of files) and the state of the files inside an archive in order to find corruptions or intentional of accidental changes of states or removal of files inside an archive.
Backup Checker on github
The new feature of the latest version 1.4 is the control of outdated archives with the new outdated parameter. Lots of data are outdated quite fast, because they are dependent of other data, or because they are only useful in a specific context.
Hey, this database dump is 6 months old, it’s useless today!
Backup Checker now controls the expiration duration and triggers a warning if the given duration starting from the last modification of the archive (mtime) is expired. Short examples of the warning:
WARNING:root:/backups/backups-12022015.tar.gz is outdated. Was good until 01/03/15 00:00:00 – now 22/03/15 21:38:20
You won’t be surprized any more by outdated useless data in your backups.
Backup Checker also offers lots of other controls. Check the features list!
Installing Backup Checker
Backup Checker is available from PyPI using the following command:
# pip3.4 install backupchecker
It’s also available for your Debian Squeeze or Debian Wheezy. Check how to get it for your specific distributions.
What about you? How and what for do you use Backup Checker? We would be happy to get your feedbacks. The project cares about our users and the outdated feature was a awesome idea in a feature request by one of the Backup Checker user, thanks Laurent!