Corrupted tape backup. 4188

Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Now that is not fair.

With a good tape drive and using good tapes, they are extremely reliable. And if you use good backup software, you should be pretty much guaranteed you have a good backup.

I use Exabyte VXA tape drives that are inherently more reliable than many other types. They are helical scan with four heads. Every other one writes and the others read, so they read each block immediately after writing to make sure it is there.

I use BRU for backup, and after it has written a backup tape, it rewinds it and reads it to make sure it is good (it has written a checksum into each block, and verifies this on playback). I have never been unable to restore from one of these tapes. If I use a tape too long (BRU counts the number of writes), I once in a while get a tape that will not write, but I never got one I could not read.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 06:45:00 up 43 days, 38 min, 3 users, load average: 4.30, 4.20, 4.01