Summary of Responses to Disk Partitions on large disks
Spencer W. Thomas
thomas at utah-gr.UUCP
Wed Jan 11 15:00:20 AEST 1984
Re doing full saves only every 6 months. You should make D**M sure that
those tapes are readable and have NO errors (or potential errors)! I
have been bit too many times by unreadable save tapes. Luckily, we do
full saves once a month, so I can usually back up a month and still get
the file I want. If I had to back up almost a year, there would be much
less chance of it being there. A simple check is
dd if=/dev/rmt8 of=/dev/null bs=20b
In fact, J Lepreau here modified our (4.1) dump program to re-read each
tape in a save-set after writing it, checking for errors. If a read
bombed, it would then prompt to remount a NEW tape and resave that
volume. This was after we found that tape 5 of a 10 tape filesave had a
nasty bad spot in the middle.
Moral: Don't assume that just because it's been put on a save tape you
can get it back.
=Spencer
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