"Carey Jung" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > > when I do amcheck and no error are reported, can I trust it 100 %
> > > that the backup will work?
> >
> > Well, there's always Murphy's law :-)
> >
>
> amcheck doesn't, by default, try to write to the tape. It just reads the
> label. If, for example, the write-protect tab is set on today's tape,
> amcheck will succeed, but the backup will fail. (Actually, if you've got
> sufficient holding disk space, only the flush will fail.)
Not exactly. Amanda might (/will?) go to degraded mode and do only
backup levels >0, if you use the standard configuration without
changing the "reserve" parameters. The word "flush" is a bit
misleading in this case.
A (neglected) reason to have more tapes than used in one dump cycle is
being able to use "amcheck -w". The write test is destructive.
>From the amcheck man page:
"
-w Enables a destructive check for write-protection on
the tape (which would otherwise cause the subse�
quent amdump to fail). If the tape is writable,
this check causes all data after the tape label to
be erased (actually depends on the device driver:
there is no portable non-destructive way to check
for write-protection). The check implies -t and is
only made if the tape is otherwise correct.
"
Why doesn't Amanda use the following portable, non-destructive write test:
read label; amlabel -f config label
Does it mess up the indexes?
Johannes Niess
