On Jan 29, 2014, at 1:39 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at Update.UU.SE> wrote:
On 2014-01-28 18:59, Zane Healy<healyzh at
aracnet.com> wrote:
On Jan 28, 2014, at 5:31 PM, Paul Koning<paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
>But BRU produces something structurally
different from VMS save sets, doesn?t it?
It's been so long since I've
looked at any of this, I honestly don't remember. I was thinking that RSX-11 backups
would be readable by at least some versions of VMS.
No. VMS BACKUP cannot read RSX BRU format savesets. But you can (could) run BRU on
VMS...
>RSTS
Backup actually generates VMS save sets, the same format.
That's good to know.
Right. Different PDP-11 OSes use different formats, so it's not really meaningful to
ask about "PDP-11 backup". You need to specify which backup format you are
talking about.
I think I know of at least four.
RSX used to use something called DSC (which stood for Disc Save and Compress), which was
eventually replaced by BRU.
There was an irreverent reading for DSC: ?disk smash and corrupt?.
I forgot what IAS (and RSX11-D) used. DSC possibly.
I assume RSTS/E had some backup format in the older
days. With RSTS/E V9 (I think it was), a new backup utility was created, which is the VMS
compatible one.
V9 sounds right. It was coincident with support for streaming tape drives, which needed
asynchronous (queued) I/O to work properly, and that in turn meant serious work on the
backup program. The designer decided to adopt the VMS backup format as a good one to use
(because of things like XOR block redundancy and CRC data integrity checks).
Before then there was a crude program also called Backup (but entirely unrelated) that
could do partial backups. And an entirely different program called SAVRES (save/restore)
that would do whole disk backup but could, I think, do partial restores. And going back
even further, there was ROLLIN ? that?s just a full disk image copy, to another identical
disk, or DECtape(s) (or perhaps also magtape, I don?t remember). None of those older
programs were compatible with any other OS.
I'm not aware if RT-11 also had some backup tool, but I would assume so.
There?s always PIP, of course.
paul