Re: Testing archives

> > Is there anyway to test whether my archive tape is any good - > other than trying a restore from it? When I do a level 0 > archive from cron, my mail shows me the percent done messages > up to 30% and then it jumps to 100% and gives me the list of > tape necessary to restore the system (one). What's happening > to 40% and 50%, etc? Rather disconcerting. Archive status > in tbmonitor shows the same tape info. > Typically, we just run a 'dd(1)' on the tape to see if it complains about a tape error. If it doesn't, then we assume that the archive is otay. WRT the Percent Done, I THINK that what that number represents is the percentage of the entire database that has been archived. However, I pretty confident that tbtape does not archive the "empty" pages of the database. So, if you've got 2 gig of allocated space in your OnLine instance, but you've only got about 600Meg worth of actual data, then as tbtape slowly writes out the used pages the Percent Done indicator slowly increments, but when it hits all of that empty space at the end of the database, it just effectively skips it all. So, basically: tbtape only writes pages with data in them the Percent Complete takes into account all pages, full and empty The database typically fills up from the front. But then, since I didn't write tbtape, I could be just blowing smoke. It sure makes a good party story though! (yeah, I guess that would be a pretty sad party...) Will (villy@collinscomp.com)