Good drives and tapes rarely have errors. If you are getting
frequent tape errors you should investigate why; your tapes
and/or drives could be in need of cleaning/repair/replacement.
Since failing drives and tapes don't get better, just worse,
you will be continually adding more workarounds (shorter backup
cycles, duplicate backups, duplicating data on your systems,
archiving in error-tolerant formats, etc.) and still always
live in fear of having to attempt a restore. I've been there,
done that, and its certainly no fun.
If your company won't pay to repair or replace whatever it
takes, and you don't have any other employment options at the
moment (I know times are tough in IT), be sure to document your
problems, send memos, add it to your reports, so when (not if)
you are unable to restore critical data due to tape errors you
won't be the one escorted out the door.
Frank
--On Saturday, September 14, 2002 13:16:10 +1000 Jason Thomas <jason AT
topic.com DOT au> wrote:
> we had the same problem, we now store the data uncompressed on the tape.
> And still get frequent errors.
>
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 06:14:46PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 10:25:29AM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>>
>> > Is it a real, or theoretical, problem? I.e. has anybody experienced bit
>> > errors
>> > in a gzip'ed document? For me the incidence is low enough that I don't
>> > feel a
>> > need to use bzip2 for that extra protection. The value of your data may
>> > lead
>> > to a different conclusion.
>>
>> I brought this up and it's not theoretical - I've had problems with gzipped
>> tar files coming back off tapes. I definitely have problems with my tape
>> drive but as mentioned, such errors in a tar file would only have caused
>> problems with some files - with the gzipped tar file, you're done for once
>> you hit an error.
--
Frank Smith fsmith AT hoovers
DOT com
Systems Administrator Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online Fax: 512-374-4501
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