> So, has anyone else had trouble with multiple tape dumps?  I haven't
> erased these tapes yet, if there's any information you think I should
> look for that would help.

Yes.  I reported a problem many months ago after attempting to restore
some tuff from tape. 

Thank heavens for grep, I include the problem description below.

>Date: Sun, 19 Feb 1995 23:24:13 +1100
>From: "Simon J. Gerraty" <sjg@zen.void.oz.au>
>Message-Id: <199502191224.XAA04157@zen.void.oz.au>
>Subject: NetBSD-1.0: any known probs with restore?

I'm running on an i386 but since normal tape operations work fine, I'm
assuming this is not i386 specific...

The disk that my home directories was on died yesterday - found it not
spinning.   Anyway I let it cool down for a few hours and brought the
system up again and took level 0 dumps of that disk.  Several hours
later the disk stopped again.  I've removed it from the system.

Sadly the /users partition spanned two tapes and I while I have no
trouble recovering of the first volume, the 2nd gives me:

restore > extract
Extract requested files
You have not read any tapes yet.
Unless you know which volume your file(s) are on you should start
with the last volume and work towards towards the first.
Specify next volume #: 2
Mount tape volume 2
Enter ``none'' if there are no more tapes
otherwise enter tape name (default: /dev/rst0) 
resync restore, skipped 30 blocks
Memory fault 
root:2604$ 

Last night I did volume 1 first and got the above when I switched to
volume 2.

Of coures it could be a faulty tape.  So I tried a backup done in
Decemnber:

restore > extract
You have not read any tapes yet.
Unless you know which volume your file(s) are on you should start
with the last volume and work towards towards the first.
Specify next volume #: 2
Mount tape volume 2
Enter ``none'' if there are no more tapes
otherwise enter tape name (default: /dev/rst0) 
resync restore, skipped 23 blocks
You have read volumes: 2
Specify next volume #: 1
Mount tape volume 1
Enter ``none'' if there are no more tapes
otherwise enter tape name (default: /dev/rst0) 
resync restore, skipped 13 blocks
set owner/mode for '.'? [yn] n
restore > 

but it kept going.  I hope that first 23 (and 13) blocks were not
important.  I had a quick look at the source for dump/restore and
nothing seemed to suggest that the above (skipping blocks) is
harmless.  I'm certainly not used to seeing that message when using
restore. 

I'll be buying a new disk and see if I can get the old one up long
enough to transfer data accross but I'm concerned that I can't rely on
the backup tapes...

Has anyone else had problems?  

--sjg