doing test-restores of dump tapes?

[Ruth Milner]

I would like to be able to do a full and complete read of our dump tapes
after they have been made. Currently we do a selective restore of one file
from each dump, which on average will force reading through half the dump
(and in theory by choosing the inode carefully, one could force reading
through more). However I don't really like this option as it doesn't
strike me as really thorough (we do our dumps late at night on live
filesystems), and it involves interactively selecting a file and cleaning
it up afterwards. I would ideally like to restore a dump to /dev/null, or
something similar, so that the entire contents of the dump are read, and
any tape errors and other filesystem problems are uncovered. dd'ing to
/dev/null will show tape errors, but since dd doesn't know about
filesystems, potentially more serious problems that could occur during a
full restore remain unknown. Is there any way to do this using restore,
without actually restoring to a real partition?

We are running various systems at 3.4, SPARC 3.2FCS, and SPARC SunOS4.0,
using 1/4" tape, 1/2" magtape, and an Exabyte drive with Sun SCSI
adapter/driver.

Thanks for any suggestions on this.

Ruth Milner
Systems Manager
University of Toronto Physics

sysruth at helios.physics.utoronto.ca  (Internet)