Interpreting Fixity Reports

Overview

Vault provides multiple reports to make it easy to review information about your Vault account. This article outlines how to access and interpret your Fixity Report. 

In this article: 

• About Fixity Reports
• How Fixity Reports Work
• Reviewing Your Fixity Reports

About Fixity Reports

Fixity audit and repair is a key element of the preservation features of the Vault service. See the Vault Vault Storage, Preservation & Sustainability section for more general information on file fixity and preservation in Vault.

The standard Vault service package includes two reports per year documenting fixity audit and repair operations for collections in a Vault account. Additional fixity audit and repair operations may be conducted more than twice per year as part of general infrastructure maintenance and monitoring, but this activity would not be published in a report. More frequent fixity operations and reporting can be requested by a Vault user as an add-on service feature. If you are interested in that add-on, please reach out to us at [e-mail]. 

How Fixity Reports Work

Fixity reports are generated on a per-collection basis. Thus, each Vault account will receive two fixity reports per year for each of its collections. When a fixity report is generated, an automated email will be sent to any Vault Admin roles and their associated email address. See Managing Your Users for more information on various user roles in Vault. The email will include a link to the fixity report. Fixity reports can also be accessed from multiple places within the Vault application.

Reviewing Your Fixity Reports

Fixity reports can be accessed from the:

• Reports page in the Vault application,
• Activity tab in the details pane of the selected collection on the Collections page
• Fixity Reports API

Additionally, recent reports will be listed in the Reports card on the Vault Dashboard.

A fixity report has two sections:

1. Summary information about the overall fixity operation
2. A link to download the complete fixity report, which includes reporting for each individual file in the collection that was audited and, if necessary, repaired. 

Summary Information:

The summary information includes the collection, the date it was created, the number of files that were checked, how many were checked successfully or failed, and the total size of the files. It will display as follows:

Download Complete Report link

At the bottom of the summary is a 'Download Complete Report' link, which, when clicked, will download a .csv file to your device. 

The data included in the file reports is as follows:

/[collection name]/[file name]

• Size: file size
• Ref. MD5: the file’s MD5 checksum that was generated upon deposit into Vault
• Ref. SHA1: the file’s SHA1 checksum that was generated upon deposit into Vault
• Ref. SHA256: the file’s SHA256 checksum that was generated upon deposit into Vault
• [Storage location code]: [audit outcome: PASSED or FAILED], timestamp of audit
• [Additional storage locations by code]: [audit outcome: “PASSED” or “FAILED”], timestamp of audit
• (if “FAILED” at any storage location) [Storage location code]: REPAIRED, timestamp of repair

The checksums in the report are the original checksums generated when the file was deposited into Vault. The fixity audit and repair operation generates a new checksum at the time of audit (generally only one of the three checksums is newly generated at audit time) and compares it to the corresponding original checksum. If the checksums match, the audit’s outcome is passed. If the checksums do not match, the audit’s outcome is failed. Upon failure, a repair operation commences. The repair process audits another copy of the file, generates a new checksum, and if that audit is passed, that file is copied and the new copy replaces the corrupted copy that failed the original audit. For what each storage location code means, see Vault Storage Locations.

Last updated on January 12, 2024.