> -----Original Message-----
> From: Smith, David W (IT) [mailto:d AT kla-tencor DOT com]
> Sent: January 10, 2002 01:09
> To: 'veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu'
> Cc: Smith, David W (IT)
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Veritas NetBackup: Dealing with Frozen tapes?
<snip>
> 
>   How do we verify what is a good tape and what is a bad tape?

That is tape dependent. 9840's, for example, should be sent to manufacturer
for testing. You could try a basic 'tar' yourself to the tape until it fills
to see if you get IO or RW errors though. Some manufacturers won't take this
as definitive (ie: 9840's mentioned above)

>   How do we get the data off the tape which was written 
> before we got an error?

bpduplicate can be used to duplicate tapes. bpimmedia can be used to find
which images are on a particular tape, then you can duplicate those images
to another tape and expire the original image.

>   How do we know where the bad image starts on the tape, etc?

Images that experienced problems may not have had their metadata saved by
NetBackup, in favour of trying again. There is no real way to do this that I
know of. There are a few commands that read through the tape to do things.
bpverify and bpduplicate come to mind. If you use bpimmedia to get a list of
images, then use bpverify for the images and see at which point the bpverify
command has problems.

Just a thought. I've never needed to do it myself.

>   What is the typical procedure to verify tapes?

There is a bpverify command that compares tape contents to metadata
contents. I don't know if there's a way to do an actual data verification.

Jason
--
Jason Ahrens, Systems Analyst
TELUS Enterprise Solutions
http://www.telus.com
The Future is Friendly