Patent ID: 8631281

Claim:
A system for archive verification, comprising: a tape library including a drive and tape media coupled to a network; a verification device coupled to the network and configured to: identify a first set of tape media meeting criteria for a verification policy on which to initiate a verification process, wherein the criteria comprise one or more of a time period, a type of media, a read count, a load count or an error count; perform an initial verification of the first set of tape media to verify readability of tape media in the first set of tape media, including loading the first set of tape media into one or more drives allocated for the initial verification; obtain an initial result for each tape media in the first set of tape media; unload the first set of tape media from the one or more drives; identify a second set of tape media comprising tape media from the first set of tape media that resulted in at least a threshold number of errors in the initial verification; place the second set of tape media in a verification queue; perform a subsequent verification for each of the second set of tape media to verify readability of each of the second set of tape media, wherein performing the subsequent verification further comprises: in response to determining that an available drive allocated for the subsequent verification was not used for the initial verification of a tape media at a head of the verification queue, loading the tape media at the head of the verification queue in the available drive; in response to determining that the available drive was used for the initial verification of the tape media at the head of the verification queue, loading that tape media in a second drive allocated for the subsequent verification when the second drive is available; obtain a subsequent result for each of the second set of tape media; and determine a verification result for each tape media in the second set of tape media based upon the initial result and the subsequent result for each of the second set of tape media; and wherein the verification device is further configured to generate a report comprising one or more of hard errors, soft errors or an error rate.