> I've been tasked with "guaranteeing" that the backup vtapes or in the > future real tapes are "good." So I found the command amverify that > seems to be the correct routine but I want to know does it completely > check the archive and the files contained within?
Amverify will try to extract any backup from the backup media, uncompress the files and see if they are readable. By no mean amverify will conduct a comparison file by file, for the simple reason that we are talking about live system and the files will have change between the moment they were backuped and the moment they are verified, so the verification would always show non-matching files, so you could not say anything about the correctness of your backup. To add to the answer of Gene, yes, amverify add wears and tears to the tape and the tape drive, but I have been using it anyway, just to be sure. I don't use cheap helical type tapes, that gets too much problems, but expensive ones, they are more expensive than a disk drive nowdays, so the next choice will be vtapes on some extractible disk. Bests, Olivier
