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

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> writes:
> Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> writes:
> 
> > Jerry McAllister writes:
> > 
> > > Actually, if used frequently for backups - such as every day, DAT is
> > > notoriously prone to failure.
> > 
> > I've heard this for years, but I've never encountered it, on my own
> > systems or on any others.  My drives are HP SureStore SCSI drives.
> > Currently I have BASF tapes, and they've gone through about 40 cycles.
> > I take backups every few days, or whenever there are large changes to
> > the data on the server (most of the time the only changes are log files
> > and things like that).
> > 
> > > 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.
> 
> Listing the archive contents might be what you're looking for, then...

That sounds good, but...
Unfortunately, I have been able to look at the dump index but not 
read anything past that many times.  Or have been able to read a
low inode file but not get a higher inode file.   Remember that the
files are written on the dump in inode order.   That is why I suggested
trying to read a couple of high inode files - or maybe a few spaced
out over the inode range that was dumped.

Dump/restore are good utilities, but have some glaring holes in
what they can do.

////jerry
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