How to backup safely ?

[Bj|rn Smith]

At the moment we are backing up our two filesystem /root and /u once
every month using "backup 0...". Besides that we have a streamer tape
permanently inseted performing automatic delta backups of the /u file
system every night by doing "backup 9...".

What happens is any of the tapes Im using is damage ?
I suppose "backup" wont discover that. Can I perform a "restore" to
/dev/null immediately after backup just to ensure that the tape is correct ?
Does "restore" returns any exit code if there is some kind of checksum
error in a tape block ?

Same worries about the disk surface. Will "backup" return any exit code if
it finds a bad spot on the disk ?

Should one perform a fsck before backup ?

How should one do this in a safe way ?


Thanks in advance for any advice !

--
Bj|rn Smith	Compound Systems, phone +46 8 7923689
UUCP:	 	{uunet,mcsun}!sunic!comsys!smith
Internet:	smith at compound.se