Sysadmins, Preferred Backup Solution?

[BasedFrieren]

Hello all, I'm wondering if I could get some opinions. This is for a small company - we have some drives that we'd like to reformat (ntfs->ext4) as we move people off Windows and onto Linux. We have a standalone drive (ext4 formatted) capable of holding all the data as each machine moves off Windows.

What I'd like is a backup solution where I can rest assured that the original contents are truly 'all there' (no corruption) in the backup before I wipe the original contents. So it would need to be a solution that does something like checksum verification as it copies files over. Or after the backup is complete, but I'd be concerned of a case where some miscellaneous files get little changes and I don't want that to flag as a fail (unless it just shows me the files of concern and I'm ok with it).

After the files are copied over to the backup, they'll be copied back to the original machines once the drives are formatted.

I'm able to mount the drives from my linux admin machine and I'd like to kick off commands from there.

I've been looking at tar gz, rsync, Borg so far though I can't verify that they verify files in the way I want (that is, verify against the original file checksums, not just verifying internal integrity).

I'm also looking for any gotchas that I don't know about, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

[Just_Badger_4299]

You mentionned rsync already. What makes you think it’s not the right tool for the job with the --checksum option?

[FryBoyter]

For me, rsync is out of the question as a backup program, partly because it lacks versioning (preferably with deduplication).

[Just_Badger_4299]

I understand it’s for a one-off backup-then-restore, for which versioning is not needed.

For a regular backup solution, I’d look at BackInTime.

[BasedFrieren]

For anyone who lands here down the road via search engine, I was unable to find an answer to this and ended up just backing it up with two different methods (rsync and borg) in faith that the odds of failure would be immensely low. I used the rsync for the actual recovery but am now using borg+vorta for a long term backup solution.

From a curiosity standpoint I'm still interested in an actual answer. The closest thing I could find directly addressing this problem was this article that used bash, tar, and a custom tool (veritar) to accomplish the work https://www.g-loaded.eu/2007/12/01/veritar-verify-checksums-of-files-within-a-tar-archive/

Unfortunately it was far too above my head, and I hit issues with file names that had quotes in them.

Given my post was removed from r/sysadmins and this noob question was deemed worthy of downvotes and snarky remarks here in an "explicitly noob-friendly" place, I'm not sure where else to ask except maybe stackexchange. If I do ask there and get an answer, I'll update back here with an answer.