[Info-vax] Unexpected error using ZIP for OpenVMS

[AEF]

On Jan 4, 9:18 am, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <9630a4cc-2498-4f33-be69-65c848946... at z25g2000vbs.googlegroups.com>, AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> writes:
>
>
>
> > Well, I'm pretty sure older versions can't. I believe this capability
> > was added to VMS BACKUP around v6 or v6.2, but I'm not sure.
>
>    BACKUP has never failed me, going back to VMS 1.x on an 11/780.   I
>    don't recall exactly when in there the ability to get to 16 directory
>    levels was implemented for ODS-2 via rooted logicals, it might have
>    been in some minor version that we skipped, but I don't recall a
>    problem or a fix.  I think the ability to deal with it was added
>    to BACKUP before the capability to have it shipped.
>
>    I very much recall using rooted logicals with no depth problems under
>    VMS 5.2 through 5.5-2.
>
>    And yes, I do recall using DSC2 before BACKUP got /IMAGE.

When I was in graduate school I sometimes used a VAX 11/780 located at
the Computer Science Center. They had something like the following in
their announcement banner:

Do not create directories more than six levels deep.

The used something like

    define user_disk disk:[users.]

so that already accounts for one level. I bet someone got burned by
not having some really deep stuff covered by incremental backups! I
remember one guy had something like USER_DISK:
[LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH.LABYRINTH].

An incremental backup would miss stuff in the deepest directory.

Yeah, you could go 16 levels deep, but non-image BACKUP save
operations would miss levels more than 8 deep.

Yeah, we're talking old, v3 or v4.

Well, BACKUP may have never failed you back as far as v1.x, but that
depends exactly what you needed from it!

Regardless, 8 or 16, an annoying limit.

AEF