This program reads a VMS backup tape.

WARNING: This version is still well short of the full features of
BACKUP.  Hopefully this file should somewhat document the various
quirks and limitations (although it doesn't do as good a job of
describing the things which are completely missing).

If you have patches to send in or reports of success and/or failure, I
guess for now the place to send them is [email protected].  In the
future there is a good chance there will be some mailing list for
VMSBACKUP or for "Free-VMS file utilities" or some such category; you
might want to see if http://www.lp.se/free-vms/ has something more
up-to-date than this paragraph (as of this writing the only thing
there is that BACKUP is listed in the task list).

To find out what version you have on unix use the -V option.  On VMS,
ANALYZE/IMAGE/HEADER VMSBACKUP.EXE and look for the part where it says
"image file identification:".  In the sources look at getoptmain.c or
build.com (which will have the same version number, unless someone
messed up).

To build on unix, "make".  To build on VMS, "@build".

Known bugs include:

* Poor handling of redundancy groups.  If you create a saveset with
/GROUP_SIZE=0, then vmsbackup will be do just fine, but if the group
size is nonzero (the default), then vmsbackup/LIST will tend to list
files twice.

* On VMS systems probably cannot read tapes (only savesets in .BCK files on
disk).  Maybe it could be done if you mount the tape non-foreign, but I don't
know of anyone who has tried that.  Reading tapes does work on non-VMS
systems (at least with version 3.0; presumably with more recent versions too).

* One cannot specify a file to list to, as in /LIST=file.

* /LIST/FULL prints much less than BACKUP; I haven't decoded most of
the brh_dol_k_file info yet.

* Some of the record formats and record attributes are not printed
using the same text that BACKUP uses.  This is just a matter of going
through and figuring out what it should be in each case (would
synergize nicely with testsuite, below, because then we could just run
the testsuite on vmsbackup and on BACKUP and make sure they agree).
Extraction is even worse; anything other than a text file is unlikely
to get extracted in any useful manner.

TODO:

* Anyone want to write a testsuite?

* Implement lots more features.

Open questions:

* Is there a documented standard for what savesets look like?  From
DEC or from http://www.bbc.com or from anyone else?

History:

The tape program is originally written by John Douglas Carey and
the pattern matching routine by some unknown on the net. 

The remote tape option use the rmtlib from mod.sources.

A good way to archive remotetape access for users with only
a local account is to create a "netwide" user tar and let
the remote tape programs do suid to user tar.

The program is tested on vax and sun.


Sven-Ove Westberg 
Lulea University of Technology
S-951 87  Lulea,  Sweden
UUCP:  [email protected]
UUCP:  {decvax,philabs,seismo}!mcvax!enea!luthcad!sow