Very Computer

My Octane is dead for the moment, and I'm trying to get to some
of the files from the last backup I made, which was using the
IRIX 6.4 system backup utility.  Well, I've got IRIX 6.2 and
5.3 boxes around, and their restore utilities aren't reading
the tape ("Checking tape header ... Insert correct tape and hit
continue...").  Does anybody know if there's an incompatibility
between the backup formats of these IRIX's, or is my tape just
shot?  If there's an incompatibility, is there a command line,
file-specific restore I can do from the tape under one of the
older IRIX's?

The Octane disks are ok, so I'm not in the worst trouble, but
maybe I should be buying new tapes more often...

Many thanks.

--
________________________________________________________________

Department of Chemistry, University of Mississippi  601-232-5329
University MS 38677 USA                             fax 232-7300

Hi Andrew,

SGI regularily changes the backup format used for the
Backup command.

Try reading the first part of the tape using dd, e.g.:

dd if=/dev/nrtape of=/tmp/panic1 bs=256k count=1

and then:

file /tmp/panic1

will tell you the format of the data on the tape.

Then you'll have to look into using either tar, bru, xfsdump, or
cpio to read the tape.

Mogens
--
Mogens Kjaer, Carlsberg Laboratory, Dept. of Chemistry
Gamle Carlsberg Vej 10, DK-2500 Valby, Denmark
Phone: +45 33 27 53 25, Fax: +45 33 27 47 08

Which is one reason why I call bru "the best write-only backup tool
available" :-(

Use tar , gtar, or even xfsdump. Don't  rely on bru abd you'll be on the
safe side.