filelistonly vs verifyonly

[Tech Witch]

Hello all. Does anyone know if a successful completion of a 'restore
filelistonly' command would indicate that a backup file is valid? I've
noticed some of our backup jobs failing during the verify phase of the
maintenenace plan because of network issues, and I'd like a quick way to
check if the backup is valid because some of the backup files take hours to
verify. I searched MS Support and they don't seem to have any info on this.

TW

[Erland Sommarskog]

Tech Witch (te********@gmail.NOSPAM.com) writes:

Hello all. Does anyone know if a successful completion of a 'restore
filelistonly' command would indicate that a backup file is valid? I've
noticed some of our backup jobs failing during the verify phase of the
maintenenace plan because of network issues, and I'd like a quick way to
check if the backup is valid because some of the backup files take hours
to verify. I searched MS Support and they don't seem to have any info
on this.

I can't say for certain, but my gut feeling is that a "filelistonly" is
a far cry from verifying the entire backup. An OK FILELISTONLY will tell
you that the backup is not completely broken, but there might still
be occassional errors, because of bad disk sectors, network glitches (when
backing up to a file share), tape-drive glitches (when backing up to
tape).

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, es****@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp