Verifying Tape Writes

[Aron Burns]

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
[...]
>Any suggestions?

To verify that the media is good, try
dd if=/dev/tape of=/dev/null
and if you see something liek
35000+0 blocks in
35000+0 blocks out
this tells you that the same number of blocks went in as out ( should
always happen ) and that there were no retries (+0). This does not 
verify that the tape info matches the disk info, only that the
media is good.  



Aaron Burns      	     "Nothing I say on the net is binding
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