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From: scott@thirdi.uucp (Scott Southard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Verifying dump tape consistency without restoring
Message-ID: <1990Nov8.004559.3904@thirdi.uucp>
Date: 8 Nov 90 00:45:59 GMT
Organization: Third Eye Software, Inc.
Lines: 16

We are currently dumping our filesystems to an Exabyte tape drive nightly,
and assuming that if dump gives no errors the dump was successful.  I have
some doubts as to whether this is alway true, and would like to examine
the tape (without restoring the contents to disk) to determine whether the
tape is indeed ok.  Does anyone know of any utilities for verifying the
consistency of a dump tape?  The 't' option to the restore program may
uncover errors in the table of contents, but I'm doubtful whether a
successful read of the table of contents indicates a completely consistent
dump.  How do other people deal with this problem?  Has anyone out there
ever seen a case where dump succeeded but a restore of the dump tape
failed?

I'm using a Sun SPARCstation 1 running SunOS4.03.
-- 
Scott Southard                  scott@thirdi  or, for stupid mailers:
Third Eye Software, Inc.        {pyramid,sun,apple,hpda}!thirdi!scott