28 Restoring files without tbackup

Contents of this section

In one particular disaster scenario, you don't have a Linux machine with tbackup and trestore at your disposal, but need to get files from your backups anyway.

28.1 Floppy archives

The following text describes how to unpack a floppy backup set if you don't have tbackup.

  1. get access to a unix machine with a large amount of free disk space.
  2. find a way to copy the contents of MS-DOS disks to this unix machine.
  3. copy the files named PARTAA.001, PARTAB.002, ... from the backup disks.
  4. cat them all together in one large file, i.e.
    cat `ls part* | sort` >archive
    
  5. look at the export dea_unpackmethod=... line in a DESCR2K file on one of the disks to find out if the archive is a tar or an afio archive.
    1. if the archive was packed with tar, use tar to unpack it.
    2. if the archive was packed with afio, unpack it with afio or cpio. (Afio produces cpio-format archives.)

If you don't have access to a unix machine you may have some luck with tar, afio or cpio ports to other operating systems (MS-DOS, VMS, OS/2, amigaOS, ....), provided the ported versions have a sensible way of dealing with filename limitations.

28.2 Tape archives

If you do not have tbackup installed, you can use the lower-level backup tool tar or afio, depending on what pack method you used when creating the archive to read the tape directly. If you used GNU ecc to add error correcting codes to tape, you need to read the tape with ecc and pipe the result to the archiver.

If you don't have access to a unix machine you may have some luck with tar, afio or cpio ports to other operating systems (MS-DOS, VMS, OS/2, amigaOS, ....), provided the ported versions have a sensible way of dealing with filename limitations. Afio produces cpio-format archives, so you can use a cpio port to unpack an archive created by afio on linux. Compressed files in the archive will not be automatically decompressed though.

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