Furtive¶
File Integrity Verification (furtive) aims to ensure long term data integrity verification for digital archival purposes. The idea is to create a manifest, or hash list, of all the files of which you wish to confirm integrity. Once a manifest has been created, a user can then confirm the integrity of files at any point in the future.
The documentation is available on Read The Docs at furtive.readthedocs.org
Contents¶
Requirements¶
- Python 2.7
Getting Started¶
To install furtive, run python setup.py install.
CLI Usage¶
Suppose you have a million digital photos in a directory called my-photos that you have taken over the years.
To record the current state of the files, run furtive --basedir my-photos create
This command creates the file .manifest.yaml in the my-photos/ directory. The location and name of this file can be changed by using the --manifest argument.
At this point, you can be sure that you will know if a file has changed. To check the files on the file system to the manifest, run furtive --basedir my-photos compare. The application will output a list of files which have been added, removed, or changed. This output is YAML format so it should be easy to parse.
Tests¶
This application comes with tests. To run them, ensure you have tox installed (pip install tox). Then you can run tox to run the tests.
To build the docs, run tox -e docs
Faster YAML¶
By default, furtive will install and use the full Python implementation of the YAML parser which is very slow. In a testing environment, the Python implementation of the YAML loader took 1 minute to parse a 187,000 line furtive manifest file. By contrast, when the LibYaml parser was used, the loader took only 5 seconds to parse the same file.
To install the faster parser, perform the following steps:
- Follow the instructions from the LibYaml website to download and install the latest release of libyaml.
- Reinstall the PyYAML package by downloading the latest tar from the PyYAML website and running
python setup.py --with-libyaml install