Recoverability of Replicated Data Following Logical Corruption: An Experimental Comparison of Retention and Restore Policies
Abstract
Replication protects against infrastructure loss but can rapidly propagate logical corruption to secondary copies. We compared four retention and restore policies in 160 controlled corruption scenarios involving accidental deletion, application-level overwrite, ransomware-like encryption, and metadata damage. Replicated environments used short- and long-retention snapshot schedules with either manual point selection or automated integrity-guided restore. Recoverability, data-loss window, restore duration, and number of candidate recovery points inspected were recorded. Long-retention policies preserved at least one clean recovery point in 96% of scenarios, compared with 81% under short retention. Integrity-guided restore reduced median recovery-point selection time by 58% and was particularly effective when corruption was detected several hours after propagation. However, longer retention increased storage consumption by a median of 19%. No single policy dominated across all objectives. Combining tiered retention with automated integrity checks provided the best overall balance between recoverability and resource use. Replication strategies should therefore be designed around corruption history and detection latency, not only infrastructure failure, because replicated copies may otherwise reproduce the same logical damage.
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