verifying tar/dump/vdump

T. Horsnell (tsh) · *nix forums beginner Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 37

Hi all,
We are just discovering a nasty DLT problem, whereby data
is either being miswritten to tape (or misread from it)
without generating any hardware errors anywhere.
Fortunately, the errors show up as verification errors
with tapex, so there should be no problem convicing HP
that it's real, but we only detected this because some
paranoid user ran gnu-tar with the -d option to verify his
tar'd stuff before he deleted it.

How come there is no verify facility with any of the
Tru64 tar/dump/vdump utilities - or have I missed something?
Just running something like a dummy restore to read through
the tape would not have found this. Fortunately this tapedrive
is not used for our main backups, but I'm now very nervous.

I use vdump for backup, so I cant use the gnu-tar -d option,
and it's not reasonable to have to completely unback a saveset
to seperate disk-space, in order to compare its contents
with the originals.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Terry.

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