> [...] but I don't concur with simply destroying any
> tape that ever gets an error.

Nobody advocated that; toss-versus-try-it-again was after addressing
the OP's other possibilities and after checking the logs to see what
really happened.

> 10 minutes of troubleshooting isn't going to kill you

Ten minutes of troubleshooting, after one has already expended more
than that to determine that it is a media error, that it was more
than one on the same tape, that NetBackup's simple "is it the tape
or the drives" logic has decided it was the tape, and in which the
testing will either confirm the tape is bad or, worse, not fail
because it won't write similar bits to the same spots on the same
tracks as the original errors, is not only ten minutes of even a
junior admin's time wasted, it is dangerous.  So you ran a test and
it worked, you re-use the tape and it craps out a long backup the
next night.  How good a decision was that?  Worse, it fails on a
restore two years from now when you Really Need That Data.  Saving
fifty bucks on a new tape was worth losing data?


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