Verifying Tape Writes

[Mark A. Emanuele]

In article <528 at mermaid.Litle.Com>, tom at mermaid.Litle.Com (Tom Hampton) writes:
> We had thought that printing out a catalog of a tape's
> contents prooved that the tape would be restoreable:
> 
> cpio -itvB </dev/tape
> 
> In practice, we have found that the above commamd completes
> with success (repeatably) in instances where the tape proved
> (repeatably) unrestoreable.
> 
> Any suggestions?




Try good old dd
It will tell you if the tape is readable all the way to the end.


I use this to verify formatted disks for readability.


dd if=/dev/tape of=/dev/null

This should work (I think).

-- 
Mark A. Emanuele
V.P. Engineering  Overleaf, Inc.
500 Route 10 Ledgewood, NJ 07852-9639         attmail!overlf!emanuele
(201) 927-3785 Voice   (201) 927-5781 fax     emanuele at overlf.UUCP