Is it a bad idea to skip verify these days

[George_Mills]

I'm chewing up tape drives, tapes and cleaning cartidges faster than I'd like.

Full Backups are also taking like 7 hours with verifiy.

I just upgraded from VXA172 to an LTO3. The LTO is much faster (3 hrs with verify). But I expect our server to grow quite a bit over the never year.

To save wear and tear on tapes, drive heads and time is it a reasonable tradeoff to skip the verify step these days. I figure the tape drive is doing some on the fly check sum and knows when it's failing.

Verify has NEVER EVER failed on me in my 30 year carrier with computers except on stupid things like something change on the data between the backup and verify step (like some odd exchange issues).

So what do you think?

Maybe verifiy once a month for a sanity check.

[Ken_Putnam]

many modern drives do indeed have read-after-write capabilities.  If you drive does, monthly manual verify jobs may satisfy  your requirements.  If you have internal Auditors, check with them.

[That_Admin_Guy]

The only thing worse than having no backup, or a failed backup, is to think that you do have a (good) backup when you actually don't.
If your management wants a decent backup system than they'll have to cope with wear and tear. (you have to test actual restores as well, of course)

We had an LTO1 drive doing daily full backups for 5 year. Each job took about 9 hours (with verify). The drive never failed and I only had to replace 1 or 2 tapes. It didn't get much cleaning either ...

Results may differ...

Message Edited by That Admin Guy on 04-21-2008 02:10 PM