) (03/24/91)
I have been running Dumps of all my filesystems regularly, but have never figured out how to verify if Dump has actually done the job correctly. Is there any way of verifying a dump tape. restore -t or restore -i doesn't make it. They only list the directory area. The only way I have found to verify the tape is to record the highest INODE and tell restore to extract that file. There must be a better way.. +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ Barry A. Suskind Internet: suskind%edoras@mdcbbs.com MaBell: 703-560-5000x2348 UUCP: uunet!mdcbbs!edoras!suskind E-Systems / Melpar Division 7700 Arlington Blvd, Falls Church, VA 22046 JSNM Just Stark Naked Magic
goldfish@concour.cs.concordia.ca (Paul Goldsmith) (03/26/91)
I have been using the following to verify my tapes:
TAPE=/dev/yourtape
(
while ... ; do
mt -f ${TAPE} stat
dd if=${TAPE} bs=... of=/dev/null
done
) 2>&1
replace the "..." with the appropriate blocksizes and commands to sense the end of
tape.
This will display something like:
Exabyte EXB-8200 8mm tape drive:
sense key(0x0)= no sense residual= 0 retries= 1271
file no= 19 block no= 0
0+32 records in
0+32 records out
where the info matches up with the output of the original dump. (I use "dd" for my
dumps anyway as something like "dump ...f... ... - ... | dd of=/dev/yourtape bs=...")
While this won't tell you that every byte was correctly written and recoverable,
it will tell you that the tape got the right bytecount, and that the data is readable.
My logic is that if I didn't trust the software to do its job, I would use other
software. At least I know that the hardware didn't find any dropouts on the tape.
--
-- Paul Goldsmith
<goldfish@concour.cs.concordia.ca> (514) 848-3031
(Shirley Maclaine told me there would be LIFETIMES like this)