BACKUP source V7.3-1 to destination V7.1-2

[Chaim Budnick]

We have to create a backup saveset on tape from a V7.3-1 system and then resore it on a V7.1-2 system.

Are there any potential probles or incompatabilities with this scenario?

Chaim

[Kris Clippeleyr]

Chaim,

AFAIK no problems, except for the fact that 7.1-2 does not yet support ODS-5.

Kris.

[Chaim Budnick]

Thanjs for you reply. ODS-5 is NOT an ussue here!

Chaim

[Jan van den Ende · Accepted solution]

Chaim,

Classical answer: It depends!


IF you have not made use of the possibility to migrade to ODS-5, AND of the possibility to allocated smaller disk-cluster-sizes, then EVERYTHING is plain.

In the other cases, you will have to INIT your disk first, and then do a BACKUP/NOinit.

All the rest should be fine!

Of course, if your 7.2 & up system uses ODS-5, and you do a Backup to < V7.2, then you loose your ODS-5 special formats.
I never tried, but ISTR that special characters will be replaced by sequences including the hex representation of the ASCII value of those chars.


Cheers.

Have one om me.

Jan

[John Gillings]

Chaim,

Just to make things even harder, I tried backing up some files with ODS-5 filenames into a saveset on an Alpha V7.3-2 system and restoring on V6.2 systems (both VAX and Alpha).

The results are what you might reasonably expect, and the same for both architectures. Files with ODS-5 file names containing special characters were not restored "RMS-F-SYN, file specification syntax error". Files containing lower case characters were restored with the filespec uppercased, unless that clashed with an existing file, in which case the restore failed with "-RMS-E-FEX, file already exists, not superseded".

You can even get around the special characters by adding /CONVERT to your BACKUP SAVE command. This will adjust filespecs to be ODS-2 compatible (special characters are replaced with "$", so beware of name clashes). Naturally, /CONVERT won't exist on the target system if it's below V7.2.

As Jan has suggested, if this is an IMAGE restore, there may be issues with cluster sizes if you want BACKUP to init the volume, but if it's just ODS-2 files being saved and restored, then it should "just work".

I'd recommend using /LOG to make sure BACKUP is doing exactly what you want. If not, abort the restore and investigate what other qualifiers you can use to make it work.

(oh, and just for laughs, I tried restoring the same saveset on a V5.5-2 system - works as expected).