On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 08:26:27AM -0400, Donofrio, Lewis wrote:
> 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....|-: 
> 

Sounding like a commercial for some mutual stock fund;
"past performance does not guarantee future returns" ;)
I.e.  "verification" you might do on a tape, or even vtape,
today does mean that same medium will be good when the
chips are down.

Seems to me that two things can be ensured (for today):
that you can read the data off the medium and that your
restore procedures actually work.

Amverify will cover some of this, the ability to read
the data from the medium and, "I think", if the tools
that created the archive are local to the server, the
ability to extract the data from the archive.

The second part can only be done by actually doing restores.
Perhaps you could schedule periodic recoveries of files
or directory trees.  Do some sort of varying selection of
clients, tapes, and data to recover.  Maybe even a regular
"the chips are down" disaster exercise.


-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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