What's the easiest way to do a backup and verify?

[Anthony Atkielski]

Jerry McAllister writes:

> Actually, if used frequently for backups - such as every day, DAT is
> notoriously prone to failure.

I've heard this for years, but I've never encountered it, on my own
systems or on any others.  My drives are HP SureStore SCSI drives.
Currently I have BASF tapes, and they've gone through about 40 cycles.
I take backups every few days, or whenever there are large changes to
the data on the server (most of the time the only changes are log files
and things like that).

> The only real thing you can do is to read back the tape and look
> for a couple of files with fairly high inode numbers for each file
> system dumped.    If you can read them, you can assume the tape
> is readable.

I'm surprised there isn't just some way of reading the tape and doing a
few simple sanity checks on the data (without comparing it to anything).
A drive or tape error would likely show on such checks.

-- 
Anthony