On 8/26/19 2:01 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > I did that once for a very old hard drive, permanently allocating about > 30 sectors to a file named badsectors.fd. Worked great.
That's a clever idea... > 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. Ada Lovelace era technology. That's what I suspected. But one can always hope. > 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. I'm on tape instead of disk because it's disks we're backing up so we'll still have data when the disk goes south. Or when the computer looses it's mind and scribbles all over the disk(s). > you can read without using anything in the > amanda ammo box at all if push comes to shove while doing a bare metal > recovery. Yeah, they claim that with tape too. I haven't yet had the pleasure. -- Glenn English
