Data transfers

What is sent to RestorSignal in local mode, and what changes in a disposable environment.

What RestorSignal actually receives depends entirely on the execution mode used for the test — see Execution modes. The two modes do not behave the same way on this point, and they should never be collapsed into a single general statement.

Local mode

In Local mode, the backup artifact and the business data it contains stay inside the environment the client provides for the entire test. What reaches RestorSignal's central API is limited to the information needed to build and verify the evidence package, in particular:

• the tenant id and the test context id;
• the test (job) id;
• the type and version of the runner used;
• the date and duration of the run;
• the type and size of the restored object;
• the cryptographic fingerprint (hash) of the artifact and of the results;
• the version of the control engine;
• the results of the controls run, as PASS, FAIL, or ERROR statuses;
• any normalized technical errors encountered;
• other information needed to build the evidence package (identifiers, fingerprints, timestamp, signature).

The business data actually restored — the content of a database, restored files, or any other application-level content — is not sent to RestorSignal in this mode. This could only change through a future, explicitly documented functional change, distinct from how Local mode currently operates — it is not an option available today.

Disposable environment

Things work differently in disposable-environment mode. In that mode, the client voluntarily transfers the artifact into the restore environment RestorSignal provisions, so the restore can take place there. This point needs to be stated directly: data is genuinely transferred to infrastructure that is not the client's own, for the duration of the test. This transfer is initiated by the client — RestorSignal never goes and fetches the artifact itself — but it is nonetheless a data transfer in the literal sense, never to be confused with the absence of transfer that characterizes Local mode.

Once the transfer completes, the cryptographic fingerprint of the received artifact is verified before any restore takes place. After the test, the restored data and the secrets injected for the run are removed, and the environment itself is then destroyed — see Disposable environment for the detail of the destruction process and its limits.

A distinction that must never be blurred

These two behaviors must never be summarized by a single blanket statement such as "RestorSignal receives no data": that statement is only true for Local mode. In the disposable environment, data is genuinely transferred, for the time strictly necessary to run the test, before the environment that received it is destroyed.