> I've been tasked with "guaranteeing" that the backup vtapes or in the
> future real tapes are "good."  So I found the command amverify that
> seems to be the correct routine but I want to know does it completely
> check the archive and the files contained within?  

Amverify will try to extract any backup from the backup media,
uncompress the files and see if they are readable.

By no mean amverify will conduct a comparison file by file, for the
simple reason that we are talking about live system and the files will
have change between the moment they were backuped and the moment they
are verified, so the verification would always show non-matching
files, so you could not say anything about the correctness of your
backup.

To add to the answer of Gene, yes, amverify add wears and tears to the
tape and the tape drive, but I have been using it anyway, just to be
sure. I don't use cheap helical type tapes, that gets too much
problems, but expensive ones, they are more expensive than a disk
drive nowdays, so the next choice will be vtapes on some extractible
disk.

Bests,

Olivier