Do I need to run a verfication on LTO tape backups even though the drives themselves perform verification as they write?

Posted by ObligatoryMoniker on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by ObligatoryMoniker
Published on 2011-02-18T14:27:01Z Indexed on 2011/02/18 15:27 UTC
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We have an LTO-3 Tape drive in a Dell media library that we use for our tape backups. The article about LTO on Wikipedia states that:

LTO uses an automatic verify-after-write technology to immediately check the data as it is being written, but some backup systems explicitly perform a completely separate tape reading operation to verify the tape was written correctly. This separate verify operation doubles the number of end-to-end passes for each scheduled backup, and reduces the tape life by half.

What I would like to know is, do I need my backup software (Backup Exec in this case) to perform a verify on these tapes or is the verify-after-write technology inherent in LTO drives sufficient?

I would also be curious if Backup Exec understands the verify-after-write technology enough to alert me if that technology couldn't veryify the data or will it just ignore it making it useless anyway since even if the drive detecs a problem I would never know about it.

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