This is a clever use of the cycle test. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work, as there’s no flag that you can currently pass to the cycle workload to ask it to only do the verification, and not the cycle generation and modification. Generating and modifying a cycle twice without clearing the database in between will look like a corrupted database to the cycle test.
I’ve posted a PR that would add a parameter that would let you do this, but that will only be in 6.2, so it doesn’t help your current 6.1.8 cluster.
Until then, you’d basically just need to do roughly the same thing by hand of load in some data while taking a backup, and verify that a consistent snapshot of it is there when you restore.
It turned out that you could just the validation step all along if you used runSetup=false on cycle test, and I just didn’t know about it. It also happens that I failed to properly test my checkOnly parameter, so it’s being reverted anyway. Sorry!