tapetools and VMS Backup tapes - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Dec 2005

Ethan Dicks wrote:
...

Does anyone here have any experience with reading VMS BACKUP tapes
with tapetools?  Can you share your observations?  I haven't yet tried
reading the files - I know there were some VMS BACKUP extractors in C
years ago, and I've even used them, but I'll probably have to re-find
and rebuilt them.  I could also fire up simh and VMS, but at the
moment, my VMS install CDs are somewhere else. 
I'm actually in the middle of doing this also.  I've been working on
some tools to catalog and extract thousands of tapes, most from obscure
operating systems (ITS, Genera) and some from not-so-obscure (Unix,
VMS, TOPS-20).

I found a program recently "vmsbu.c" which seems to work.  I made some
small mods to it to handle extracted files from images.

Basically I have tape image files written in the form of tapetools.

(be careful because I think tapetools-0.4 will not pad blocks and
tapetools-0.6 will; I have a program which will analyse images and
fix this if needed)

If you take a vms backup image and run tapeextract you end up with a
small file (the 'label file') and a big file (the backup).  I modified
vmsbu.c to allow you to specify both files and then generate a TOC
and/or extract the files.

I'd be happy to put these program on my web site if you'd like them.

-brad