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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: 07 Mar 2005 15:36:55 -0500
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Subject: Re: What's the easiest way to do a backup and verify?
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Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> writes:
Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@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...