What's the easiest way to do a backup and verify?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-03-07 16:05, Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>Jerry McAllister writes:
>> The only real thing you can do is to read back the tape and look for
>> a couple of files with fairly high inode numbers for each file system
>> dumped.  If you can read them, you can assume the tape is readable.
>
> I'm surprised there isn't just some way of reading the tape and doing
> a few simple sanity checks on the data (without comparing it to
> anything).  A drive or tape error would likely show on such checks.

If cpio(1) and the 'crc' format has been used to create an archive on a
tape, then cpio can verify that the files on the tape have the same
checksum:

	cpio -i --only-verify-crc < /dev/st0

The restore(8) utility has a -N option that can be used to verify a
backup after dump(8) has been used.

- Giorgos