Fixity checking schedules — how often is enough?

Question
53
Sarah Mitchell
Feb 21, 2026 11:18 AM

We are setting up automated fixity checking using Heratio's preservation plugin. The documentation suggests monthly checks, but with 15TB of data, each run takes about 18 hours.

What schedule are others using? Is quarterly sufficient for most collections, or should high-value collections be checked more frequently?

fixity checksums preservation scheduling

1 Replies

Kwame Asante Feb 22, 2026 11:18 AM

We run monthly fixity checks on our "gold" tier (most valuable materials) and quarterly on everything else. For 15TB, you might consider staggering the checks — do a portion each week rather than the whole collection at once.

For incident response: we have a documented procedure that includes isolating the affected storage, checking backup copies, and logging a PREMIS event.