[Johnny555]

Pop'ed in the tape... Blank.

Modern tape drives (like LTO) will at least do a read after write so you should never end up with blank tapes after a backup. But still no excuse not to do restore tests.

And make sure you're not storing your backup decryption key in the same backups that are encrypted with that key. Likewise, make sure you're doing restore tests on a "cold" system that doesn't already have that decryption key (or other magic settings) loaded, otherwise you may find out in a disaster that your decryption key is inaccessible.

[squeaky-clean]

That assumes that you're even doing the write in the first place, and not just logging a million "Error device not found" on your backup task. Speaking from personal experience, haha.

[Izkata]

OP implies something like that is what was going on:

> as I questioned if the tapes were even being written to.

> I would be in the server room and never saw the blinky lights on the tape...well.. blink.