On Friday 16 August 2019 13:38:45 ghe wrote: > I have reason to believe that one of my tapes isn't working properly > (last night's backup died without finishing because of a tape error -- > the retry running right now successfully flushed last night's and > wrote a new one). > > Is there an Amanda utility that will validate a tape without > destroying the Amanda header at the front of the tape? And maybe build > a 'bad sector table' on the tape?
I did that once for a very old hard drive, permanently allocating about 30 sectors to a file named badsectors.fd. Worked great. But AFAIK, tapes don't maintain an allocation map, and we have no tape writing tools so organized as to be able to implement such a scheme. Because tape is sequential, any such attempt would have to maintain such a mapping on separate random access media. The drive would have to be able to seek past the damaged tape to the next block with a good checksum, something I've not found a drive capable of doing in around a decade of trying, they all stop and error on the bad spot. The error correction in the average terabyte class spinning rust drive has far exceeded that of tape, yes I'm talking about the sub $100 drive here, and I haven't lost a single bit of data in the 15+ years since I converted to vtape. by having amanda write to virtual tapes which are nothing but directories you can read without using anything in the amanda ammo box at all if push comes to shove while doing a bare metal recovery. In fact, because the amanda index's are only valid after the run has been completed, I have written a wrapper script that collects that, and the configuration files, and writes then all into the directory on the hd that it just used as a virtual tape. That has the effect of, in case of bare metal on a clean drive, bringing the recovery to a day fresher status. I have a machine that normally is part of the backup, with a lightning damaged psu, so that machine is missing from last nights backup. "data" is a softlink to the last runs vtape: gene@coyote:~$ sudo ls -l /amandatapes/Dailys/data/ total 26361140 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32768 Aug 26 02:03 00000.Dailys-35 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 133105 Aug 26 02:03 00001.lathe._var_lib_amanda.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 120881 Aug 26 02:03 00002.shop._var_lib_amanda.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 103947 Aug 26 02:04 00003.lathe._usr_src.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 99164 Aug 26 02:04 00004.shop._home.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 53242 Aug 26 02:04 00005.lathe._etc.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 53365 Aug 26 02:04 00006.shop._etc.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 13327331 Aug 26 02:04 00007.picnc._.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 49184 Aug 26 02:04 00008.lathe._home.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 36715 Aug 26 02:04 00009.shop._lib_firmware.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 34105 Aug 26 02:04 00010.picnc._boot.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 36713 Aug 26 02:05 00011.lathe._lib_firmware.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 35314 Aug 26 02:05 00012.shop._root.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 35244 Aug 26 02:05 00013.lathe._root.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33712 Aug 26 02:05 00014.shop._usr_local.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33713 Aug 26 02:05 00015.lathe._usr_local.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32938 Aug 26 02:05 00016.shop._var_amanda.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32939 Aug 26 02:05 00017.lathe._var_amanda.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33043 Aug 26 02:05 00018.shop._usr_lib_amanda.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33044 Aug 26 02:06 00019.lathe._usr_lib_amanda.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 12046283958 Aug 26 02:17 00020.coyote._home_gene_Download.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 187740857 Aug 26 02:18 00021.coyote._home_gene.3 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 10867557 Aug 26 02:18 00022.coyote._home_gene_Mail.3 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33569 Aug 26 02:18 00023.coyote.Downloadsnz.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 840726 Aug 26 02:18 00024.coyote._home_amanda.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 252550 Aug 26 02:18 00025.coyote._home_gene_src.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 159619 Aug 26 02:18 00026.coyote.Downloadsam.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 37341 Aug 26 02:18 00027.coyote._home_ups.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 35159 Aug 26 02:18 00028.coyote._home_nut.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 638043961 Aug 26 02:20 00029.coyote._GenesAmandaHelper-0.61_config-bak.3 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 33308 Aug 26 02:20 00030.coyote._GenesAmandaHelper-0.61.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 348438528 Aug 26 02:20 00031.coyote._var.4 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 13234614709 Aug 26 02:48 00032.coyote.PublicAap.0 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 16479741 Aug 26 02:48 00033.coyote._usr_local.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 11653827 Aug 26 02:48 00034.coyote._opt.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 841528 Aug 26 02:48 00035.coyote._usr_share.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 811008 Aug 26 02:48 00036.coyote._root.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 319176 Aug 26 02:48 00037.coyote._usr_src.2 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 278528 Aug 26 02:48 00038.coyote._home_gene_Pictures.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 256256 Aug 26 02:48 00039.coyote._usr_lib.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 196608 Aug 26 02:48 00040.coyote._usr_pix.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 163939 Aug 26 02:48 00041.coyote.PublicAqz.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32902 Aug 26 02:48 00042.coyote._usr_games.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32987 Aug 26 02:48 00043.coyote.PublicAAZ.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 122069 Aug 26 02:48 00044.coyote._lib.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 94208 Aug 26 02:48 00045.coyote._CoCo.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 73728 Aug 26 02:48 00046.coyote._usr_movies.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 73728 Aug 26 02:48 00047.coyote._usr_bin.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 73728 Aug 26 02:48 00048.coyote._home_gene_Documents.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 62029 Aug 26 02:48 00049.coyote._etc.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 53248 Aug 26 02:48 00050.coyote._boot.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 51004 Aug 26 02:48 00051.coyote._usr_include.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00052.coyote._usr_music.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00053.coyote._usr_dlds_books.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00054.coyote._usr_dlds_tgzs.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00055.coyote._usr_dlds_misc.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00056.coyote._sbin.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43015 Aug 26 02:48 00057.coyote._home_gene_PublicB.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00058.coyote._home_gene_Music.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00059.coyote._home_gene_Videos.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:48 00060.coyote._home_gene_LCNC-isos.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 43008 Aug 26 02:49 00061.coyote._bin.1 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 34660 Aug 26 02:49 00062.coyote._usr_sbin.1 -rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda 112640 Aug 26 02:51 configuration.tar -rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda 479682560 Aug 26 02:51 indices.tar Simple, and effective. That 2T drive has 60 such "vtapes" on it, so I've 60 days of backups. If for business purposes, you need more history, the "slot-nnn" of the tapes label could be extended, made sequential to the next drive, and this one taken off site for extended storage. There are script snippets to facilitate the setup of such long term usages in the tarball GenesAmandaHelper-0.61.tar.gz on my web site in the sig. All of then should be considered as examples, freely editable to suit your circumstance. Copyright 2019 by Maurice E. Heskett Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
