LabVIEW Backup/Restore: Uncertain Integrity Verification After Restore

Direct answer

No. To the best of documented behavior (this draft assumes LabVIEW 2024 Q3 or earlier — re-confirm against your exact version's Help), the Restore operation performs a raw byte copy from the .lvbak archive to the target file and never re-examines the block-level CRC32 values written into the archive at backup time. There is no known option, INI token, or VI input that enables automatic post-restore verification. If you need integrity confirmation, you add it yourself around the Restore call using File Checksum.

Established vs. needs verification

• Consistent with your premise and with common community practice: restore is a byte copy, so a truncated or bit-flipped .lvbak can silently overwrite a good file.
• Verify locally: the palette location of Backup, Restore, and File Checksum (File I/O family; exact subpalette varies by version), and which digest algorithms your File Checksum offers. CRC32 and MD5 are the safe assumption; SHA-256 availability varies.
• Do not attempt to parse the .lvbak container to validate its internal block CRCs. The format is undocumented and version-dependent.

Verification wrapper for this case

1. At backup time, hash the source file with File Checksum (MD5) and write the digest, plus the .lvbak's own digest and byte size, to a small manifest file stored next to the archive.
2. Before restoring, re-hash the .lvbak, compare against the manifest, and check its size. A mismatch means the archive was damaged after backup — stop before overwriting the live file.
3. After restoring, hash the restored file and compare its digest to the source digest from step 1. Equal means the restored bytes match what you backed up. Unequal means the archive was already bad at creation time or was corrupted in a size-preserving way — do not trust the restore.
4. On mismatch, fall back to an earlier backup or an independent copy, and log the failure if this runs unattended.

The wrapper is a handful of nodes: Restore, two File Checksum calls, string comparisons, and a case structure. Note that File Checksum hashes whole files only; it cannot expose the archive's internal per-block CRCs.

Choosing the digest

Algorithm	Use when	Caveat
CRC32	Fast sanity check for accidental corruption	Not collision-resistant; unsuitable where tampering matters
MD5	Default for backup/restore equality checks	Cryptographically weak; fine for accident detection
SHA-256	Tamper-sensitive data, if your version offers it	Confirm availability in your palette

One detail that changes the recommendation

Which LabVIEW bitness are you running, and roughly how large is the data file? File Checksum reads the entire file to hash it. On 32-bit LabVIEW with very large files (order of a gigabyte) that risks memory pressure, and I would point you at streamed hashing via .NET (System.Security.Cryptography) or 64-bit LabVIEW instead. Below a few hundred megabytes, the wrapper above works as-is.

Bench check before relying on this

Confirm the no-auto-check behavior on your own install: write a known data file, back it up, flip one byte inside the .lvbak with a hex editor, restore, and observe that Restore completes without an error while the pre- and post-restore digests differ. That single test validates both the gap and the wrapper. This draft is based on model knowledge rather than live documentation checks, so treat the version-specific details above as items for human review.