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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas
From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Summary of Responses to Disk Partitions on large disks
Message-ID: <1048@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Jan-84 00:00:20 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1048
Posted: Wed Jan 11 00:00:20 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Jan-84 00:34:33 EST
References: kpno.277
Lines: 17

Re doing full saves only every 6 months.  You should make D**M sure that
those tapes are readable and have NO errors (or potential errors)!  I
have been bit too many times by unreadable save tapes.  Luckily, we do
full saves once a month, so I can usually back up a month and still get
the file I want.  If I had to back up almost a year, there would be much
less chance of it being there.  A simple check is 
	dd if=/dev/rmt8 of=/dev/null bs=20b
In fact, J Lepreau here modified our (4.1) dump program to re-read each
tape in a save-set after writing it, checking for errors.  If a read
bombed, it would then prompt to remount a NEW tape and resave that
volume.  This was after we found that tape 5 of a 10 tape filesave had a
nasty bad spot in the middle.

Moral: Don't assume that just because it's been put on a save tape you
can get it back.

=Spencer