Backup Integrity and Recovery Readiness Assessment for High-Availability Databases

Abstract

High-availability databases that support payment, settlement, and other always-on transactional workloads require more than status-based backup monitoring; they require explicit evidence that protected data can be restored within recovery-point and recovery-time constraints. In many operational estates, protection posture is still summarized through a small set of signals such as validation success, warning counts, or dashboard status. Those signals remain useful, but they do not reliably surface latent recovery blockers such as incomplete change-history chains, stale recovery metadata, unresolved replication gaps, restore-target dependency failures, or policy breaches that make a nominally protected database operationally unrecoverable. This study proposes a dual-score assessment framework consisting of a Backup Integrity Score (BIS) and a Restore Readiness Score (RRS) for continuous post-backup evaluation in high-availability database environments. BIS measures artifact trustworthiness through validation state, corruption-free status, continuity of recoverable history, freshness, and metadata completeness. RRS extends BIS by incorporating restore-target compatibility, dependency availability, prior restore evidence, and policy penalties linked to safety-critical constraints. Hard-gate rules override favorable weighted scores whenever a single critical blocker exists. The paper presents an implementation-oriented control loop driven by scripts, SQL-based health checks, and scheduler chains, together with a controlled synthetic study of twenty scenarios used to illustrate method behavior. Within that controlled set, the framework shows stronger safety behavior than status-oriented baselines, especially for the Not-Ready class. The paper closes with a practical evidence-collection checklist to support future laboratory or field-scale validation.