[Info-vax] BACKUP to nfs-share, some files are modified

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-29 16:13:14 +0000, wolfgangburgerunread at gmail.com said:

> I´m in the process of copying some files off a VMS-cluster.
> The cluster will be shut down permanently and I would like to keep some 
> of the files.
> I have limited knowledge of VMS so I have to work with what is already 
> installed.

If you're serious about this, I'd suggest getting some assistance with 
this.   In your case, you might want to check with Christoph Gartmann 
at your organization, as he has had some experience with OpenVMS over 
the years.

> It seems like the most viable way is to mount an nfs-share under VMS, 
> and copy the files and directory structures with the integrated 
> BACKUP-command.

That would most definitely not be my choice; that's a more complex 
path, and the resulting files will be more difficult to access.

Some notes I posted on this topic a while back: 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1737>

> I´ve noticed, that some of the files got changed (corrupted) in the process.
> So far all the corrupted files I´ve seen are MS-Office files.

IIRC, Microsoft Office files were sometimes storing file data after 
their declared end-of-file; this use of unallocated storage space was 
causing problems with tools that knew the storage allocation rules.   
The usual approach for archiving those files involved transfering those 
files back off using whatever loaded them.   That's usually some form 
of Samba server or Pathworks Server software.   No OpenVMS archival 
tools will reliably preserve data stored after EOF, short of archiving 
all of the data by creating disk images.  Which is usually probably a 
pretty good idea, in any case.  Disk images will allow you to boot up 
OpenVMS — either the original environment, or a separate installation — 
and access the old OpenVMS files from another system, or OpenVMS under 
emulation, after all.

You can have trouble accessing some of the common VMS sequential files 
from other systems, due to low-level differences in the formatting — 
this can show up if you're trying to access an old application source 
file from the OpenVMS environment, for instance.  The above notes 
mention this detail.


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