Audit

Audit jobs are the processes used in LIBSAFE to check that any object is correctly preserved in the audit moment. This kind of job should be done periodically, and the configuration of the time frame should be decided either by the preservation administrator or the system administrator.

It may also be useful to carry out a manual audit at a given moment, be it of a storage system, a preservation area or a specific collection of objects. The two first types of jobs are generated preferably from the audit main page, whereas the third one must be created after selecting from the results page with the catalog functionality.

The main Audit page shows lists for audit jobs running, programmed, latest executed, with integrity faults, and with errors. The type of audit jobs is indicated out of these possible options: object audit, disk audit, and automatic audit from an ingestion job.

• An audit job with integrity faults is the audit job that detects errors in the preserved objects, but as an audit job it is finished successfully.

• An audit job with errors is the audit job that cannot be run successfully, and needs not determine if all or part of the audited objects are correctly preserved.

Should audit jobs appear under one of these two states, the system administrator will have to be consulted, who in turn will have to investigate what caused the failure and make the necessary adjustments (with or without the assistance of the LIBNOVA consultants).

Audit jobs will include the following checks:

• All the copies of an object are equal.

• The hash has not changed.

• The structure of the metadata saved is correct.

• Each one of the objects supposed to be found in an expected path is there.

In an audit job, it is not necessary to perform certain actions, such as rechecking a metadata structure, recharacterizing a format, validating a format or reviewing a signature, since any change producing such effects would mean a change in the file formation, and that would reflect immediately in a change of the file hash.

Likewise, audits of formats and signatures are independent processes that can be initiated from information saved in the cataloging system of LIBSAFE, without having to inspect the objects.