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