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

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Mar 7, 2005, at 10:05 AM, Anthony Atkielski wrote:

> Jerry McAllister writes:
>> 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.

The only way I've found to fully verify it is to get an identical 
server and actually do a full restore and test :-(

When it comes to backups, you can't be sure until you're actually under 
the gun to get the system back up and running.  Although it is easier 
when you're just backing up data files instead of bare-metal system 
state.