MySQL Bugs: #36931: Data integrity verification of Backup file not possible

Bug #36931	Data integrity verification of Backup file not possible
Submitted:	23 May 2008 21:22	Modified:	24 May 2008 18:50
Reporter:	Hema Sridharan	Email Updates:
Status:	Verified	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Backup	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	mysql-6.0-backup	OS:	Linux
Assigned to:	Assigned Account	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
* User will know the credibility of BACKUP (whether database is backed up properly or corrupted) only by performing a RESTORE operation, which is again destructive.

* Is there any alternate way to verify the contents of a backed up file and check that the data contents are good?

How to repeat:
- Perform a database backup.
- Without performing a restore, is there any way to check that data is BACKED UP properly.

==> This leaves the BACKUP OPERATION in an incredible state and the data integrity could be verified only with a successful RESTORE.

Thank you for the bug report.

This seems like it would be best implemented as a mysqlbackup option and not as a feature/extension of the BACKUP DATABASE command. If implemented in the mysqlbackup client, it could allow for quite a few checks to be made and some may not require a connection to a server to execute.

OTOH verification as described above is partially satisfied by the current ability to dump the contents of a backup image using the mysqlbackup client. If the mysqlbackup client can read the entire image, it is correct to assume that the integrity of the backup image file is intact (but possibly not the data).

It is recommended that this be added to the mysqlbackup road map.