"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
