Backup Central

Hi Everyone,
We have an Imation Secure Scan that we are wanting to use to verify if our LTO4 tapes are good or bad. The reason we got it was because we had a dozen or so tapes with bad data on them - we never got to the root of the problem of it it was the tapes or drives themselves. I've scanned the tapes that had the bad data on them and the Imation scanner says the tapes are "good" even though we know the data is actually bad... we're running into a situation right now where we need to clone a LOT of data to tapes and we don't have enough tape in stock. We want to eventually start recycling our expired tapes, but we're worried t hat those tapes are "bad" even though that drive was replaced and good data comes out of it now. Though when all of them are scanned in with the scanner the tapes are considered "good".

My question for the forum is, what would you do in our situation? How do you or would you verify that if you were to use these tapes the data would be good. Are there any products that you use that scan/lock and can also verify data integrity on the tape without putting it in the jukebox? Thanks for the help!

Wow, tall order. If you want to verify existing data, you're best bet is to utilize the application the data was written with. Each do it their own way.

To verify the media, you may to consider utilizing the drive manufacturers application for diagnostics (HP = Library & Tape Tools; IBM = IBM Tape Diagnostic Tools (ITDT); Quantum = Xtalk) and do a full write/read. This would at least require an external tape drive, the HBA, and the utility.

Some companies are pushing this very type of "feature" in their libraries (ie Quantum), where you dedicate a drive to do nothing but verify media integrity. A sales rep recently visited and offered this for our configurations (i500 & i6000), calling it EDLM (don't remember what it stood for). I'm sure other manufacturers do/will offer similar.

Tape preservaiton and Verification of media is Becoming a standard in the industry, (it wasn t the case some years ago) and many hardware manifacturer are including some solution in their libraries (the last one to come out was Oracle with their Tape Analytics) which provides some basic verification and analysis.

The issue with all these solution is that they provide, in most of the cases, raw data and no actionable reccomandation, and they are of little used by the clients. As well they check the Meida at the end of the mount and provide an average not spotting pike or bursts in some partitions of the tapes

I would check out Risk assessment solutions that are on the market today that not only do veificaiton and automated migration of the media along with proactive reccomandations. You can check out StorSentry which is becoming a standard in large archives and back ups environment.

let me know if you want some more info on the topic.