Well, finally figured out how to use the vmsbackup program to unpack a backup save set - it sure wasn't obvious. First, after reading in the whole tape, you need to extract the backup save set file with no formatting. So, it won't handle a tape container format. So, you want the XXX.BCK file put into a file with just a stream of raw bytes, with no blocksize value like in the container format. Then, you use vmsbackup like this : vmsbackup -xe -b <blocksize> -f <filename> Jon