Validating Backup Integrity for Recovery

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• Verifying backup integrity before relying on backups for ransomware recovery
• Building automated backup validation pipelines that run after each backup job
• Auditing backup infrastructure to confirm recoverability for compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST CSF RC.RP-03)
• Detecting silent data corruption (bit rot) in backup storage before a disaster occurs
• Validating that immutable or air-gapped backups have not been tampered with

Do not use for initial backup configuration or scheduling. This skill focuses on post-backup validation.

Prerequisites

• Access to backup storage (local, NAS, S3, Azure Blob, GCS)
• Python 3.9+ with hashlib (standard library)
• Backup manifests or baseline hash files for comparison
• Isolated restore environment for restore testing
• Backup tool CLI access (restic, borgbackup, rclone, or vendor-specific)