According to Sean Witham:
>
>The backups are made overnight when things are quite and consist of
>a level 0 dump of each of the data disk partions.
>

Are these dumps done on mounted file systems?  Are these file systems
very active during the time of the backup?  The problem with dump is
that it takes a snapshot of the file system at the inode level, it
works out what to backup first and then proceeds with the write to
tape.  If your file system is changing at the time then there is some
chance that you will screw up the dump.  If the file system is
reasonably quiet then you have a good chance of getting valid backups,
if the file system is being thrashed then the backup will not be good.

>Any advice on how to pin down this fault would be helpful. I have the
>suspecion that the SCSI bus is not properly terminated 

I would have expected reams of scsi errors in that case, just
corrupting data is an unlikely event.

>or there is a
>bug in dump .
>

Not very likely, dump has been around a long long time.

-- 
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
===============================================================================
  What do you get when you cross a cantaloup with a dog?        Melancholy :-P