Backups - simple question

[Shoshana Abrass]

  Once or month or so, we do an 'archive' backup to cartridge tapes 
  (as opposed to exabyte). The backup takes about 5 cartridges.

  If one of the cartridges has a bad spot, it does what I think is 
  the wrong thing.  For example, tape 1 and 2 have been successfully
  written. Files are being written to tape 3. Suddenly the driver
  encounters a write error and asks for a new tape. If I put in a new
  tape, it starts writing files where it left off from tape 3. What I 
  want it to do is rewrite all of tape 3 on the new tape. I have no 
  interest in having a tape with bad media in one of my archive sets, 
  plus it screws up offsite storage if I can't predict how many tapes 
  my backup will end up being. 

  Does this bother anyone besides me? or maybe I'm not doing the right 
  things with bru?  I use the -s size option, which doesn't seem to
  help. Using dump is not a possibility. Our tapes are data quality 
  tapes from inmac. 

  -shoshana
  shoshana at pdi.com

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