Thanks one and all for your input, I am planning on using a holding
disk, vtapes for storage and archiving to ati2 tapes.  I realize that
the amverify would be rough on tape drives, but if I use d2d I should be
fine.  And I'm aware that its done all on the clients but I need to be
able to ensure that when the chips are down (or in this case all over
the floor) that I can restore from my 12K system and not gee....|-: 

______________________________________________________________________
Lewis Donofrio AT umich DOT edu
Cell: (734) 323-8776 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org [mailto:owner-amanda-
> users AT amanda DOT org] On Behalf Of Jon LaBadie
> Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 12:05 AM
> To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: Re: amverify - reality check?
> 
> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 09:42:52AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> 
> If the backup were done on a snapshot this objection "might"
> be worked around.
> 
> Another reason a general procedure for verification does not
> exist is that the backups are not done by the server, they
> are done by the clients.  The backup, compression, encryption,
> etc. programs are all over there.  The same programs may not
> even exist on the server.  So the dump would have to be extracted
> from the backup medium, transfered across the network to the
> client, expanded from the archive, and compared to the files
> on the client.
> 
> --
> Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
>  JG Computing
>  4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
>  Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)