Verifying integrity of Backup Tapes
anubis
anubis357 at optusnet.com.au
Sat Nov 1 16:44:01 PST 2003
On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 02:31 pm, Rick Duvall wrote:
> I have some backup tapes that I have been using each once per week for
> about 8 months. I am getting errors when running amverify on a couple of
> them. To be sure that my tapes are still good and not just the system
> giving me fits, it would be nice if I could run a program that would write
> bits to the tape in question and try to read them back, telling me which
> blocks on the tape are bad. Is there such a tool that does this? I guess
> it would be kind of like a scandisk is to a DOS Floppy as what I am talking
> about is to a Unix Tape.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Rick Duvall
> Online Highways
> System Administrator
> (541) 997-8401 x 111
>
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If I get errors on tapes I bin them immediately. Tapes wear and they do have
a life span which varies from tape to tape. If you are backing up something
it is obviously important so take no chances in loosing it.
On my windows system I have the o/s backup set to verify to make sure the data
is ok. When it crashed and had to be restored from tape I found that 2 of
the tapes that were verified couldnt be read. The tapes were about a year
old. The amount of money the company lost from having an old tape could have
paid for a new server, several tape drives and media. The lesson I learnt
was tapes are cheap, turn over frequently.
Remember with dds technology they are a helical scan head. Tapes backed up on
one dds drive are not necessarily readable by any other dds drive as I found
out the hard way. Look at DLT as an alternative. Whatever you get make sure
you add in a 3 year warranty. Get one from hp or ibm. We had our hp fail at
4pm. Had a new one on site 10am next day. They only fail when you really
need them.
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