>I just tried out the amverifiy utility. But the Mail ist sends me is
>confusing. On the one hand it says "no errors", and on the other "Cannot do
>/bin/gtar dumps" which sounds like an error message to me.
"No errors" means it was able to physically read the tape and the Amanda
headers and such were OK, so, assuming you have the right software in
place, you have a good chance of being able to use it to recover data.
Amverify does one of two things with the actual image it reads from a
file on tape. First, it looks at the Amanda header and tries to figure
out the right restore program to use, then pipes the image into that
with the "t" option. For some restore programs, that will do at least a
partial internal consistency check of the image itself (note that Amanda
knows nothing about what an image looks like).
If amverify cannot figure out how to run the restore program, it will
pipe the output to dd to /dev/null. This at least verifies the tape
can be read.
"Cannot do XXX dumps" means when Amanda looked at the header for that
image, it said it was done with XXX (/bin/gtar in your case), but that
program is not installed on your tape machine so Amanda could not use
it to read the image. It fell back to using dd.
This is not unusual. For instance, I have a server that backs up Solaris,
AIX and Linux boxes. I obviously do not have the proper AIX restore
program available to run on Solaris, so amverify tells me that.
Since you're using tar, the easy fix would be to install it as /bin/gtar
on your server. More recent versions of Amanda (you didn't say what
you're running) will also take the base name of the image program and
whatever ./configure found and if they are the same, run that. In other
words, amverify would have run anything it knew about named "gtar".
You might do this:
amadmin xx version | grep GNUTAR
to see how your server is configured to find GNU tar.
> Annette Bitz
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
