zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Al Kossow]

Yes, Andy Goldstein (or whoever, but I think Andy wrote the first
version) really did a nice job in VMS BACKUP.  I once wrote a program
to read such tapes on a Unix system and needed to learn the
techniques used.  Very nice.  Indeed an entire /BLOCK_SIZE block of
data within one /GROUP_SIZE could be completely corrupted on tape,
yet BACKUP could correctly restore it.

John


--

Do you still have this (I assume it's different from the various C 
versions of "VMSBACKUP"
floating around)

That program does not do a very good job of recovering from archive 
errors.

There appears to be very little written down about the variations in 
the VMS Backup
format as well.