Integrity management for living archives
Archive Witness is a dynamic archive integrity validation and management tool for large, evolving file collections.
Your archive changes. Files are added, moved, renamed, intentionally edited, duplicated, migrated, recovered, and sometimes damaged. Archive Witness keeps a durable model of what you expected, so you can quickly discover filesystem changes without re-reading every file, selectively verify content integrity, and deliberately approve a new trusted state when change is intentional.
It is built for multi-terabyte personal and media archives, professional and preservation collections, and evidence-conscious review where integrity has to remain understandable over years of change.
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Checksums are easy. Managing change is hard.
A checksum manifest is excellent at answering one question: does this file still match a saved hash? But a living archive creates harder questions.
You add new material. Rename a folder. Replace a damaged copy. Intentionally edit a master. Move a collection to new storage. Keep an offline copy that has not been connected in months. Then one day a file no longer matches.
A checksum scan can tell you when current bytes differ from a saved reference, and some integrity tools can also report additions, removals, moves, or renames. The harder problem is what happens next: deciding which differences are damage versus legitimate evolution, updating the trusted state without erasing prior evidence, and doing that efficiently across terabytes of data. Rebuilding the manifest throws away the old baseline; leaving it unchanged turns legitimate evolution into permanent failure noise. And proving every file again means reading every byte again—expensive when the archive is measured in terabytes.
Archive Witness treats integrity as an ongoing management problem, not a one-time hashing job.
A better integrity loop
Discover changes cheaply
Refresh the catalog from filesystem metadata without opening file contents. Surface additions, absences, unexpected paths, and read uncertainty before deciding which files justify expensive content reads.
Verify what matters
Read and hash the files that need proof. Compare current bytes with accepted checksums, historical manifests, or peer evidence, and use independent media decoding when file health matters too.
Approve intentionally
When a change is legitimate, explicitly accept the new location or current version. Observation never silently becomes approval, and superseded evidence remains available instead of disappearing into a rebuilt baseline.
Built for collections that do not stand still
Personal and media archives
Photos, home video, music, Plex libraries, documents, and other collections that grow for decades across internal drives, removable storage, NAS shares, and offline copies.
Professional and preservation collections
Digital collections where fixity matters, but files are also reorganized, migrated, accessioned, replaced, or intentionally revised over time.
Evidence-conscious review and recovery
Workflows that need to preserve prior checksum and provenance evidence while distinguishing what was observed from what was deliberately accepted after review.
More than a checksum manifest
Archive Witness maintains persistent catalogs that remain useful even when an archive is offline. It can import and compare checksum manifests, reconcile evidence after path changes, compare peer archives from saved catalogs, validate supported media independently, and restore a missing or damaged file from a freshly verified healthy source without silently redefining the target's accepted evidence.
For quick one-off work, the installed Windows app also provides Hash with Archive Witness and Verify with Archive Witness Explorer commands without requiring a file to belong to a registered archive.
The result is a workflow built around a simple sequence: discover, investigate, verify, decide, and retain the history.
Clear boundaries
Archive Witness complements backups; it does not replace them. Backups preserve additional copies, while Archive Witness helps you determine whether the files you have still agree with the state and evidence you intended to preserve.
It is not a sector-recovery tool. Use DDRescue or equivalent tooling first for failing-device imaging, then use Archive Witness to assess the recovered filesystem against historical or peer evidence. It also does not currently claim to provide complete forensic chain-of-custody or automatic legal admissibility.
For the underlying concepts and practical workflows, start with Getting started and the Archive Witness documentation.