no. I would not trust CPIO to restore a system. It does not do well with named pipes, special and device files. It will also not partition a new harddrive. CPIO is good for file restores. The root and boot disks just give you access to the harddrive if you forget the root password or you have to do some maintenance and cannot boot the system from the hard drive.

If all you have are cpio backups and you have to replace your hard drive and restore your system you will have to install SCO fully and then restore the CPIO tape. This usually works but there can be some issues afterwards but nothing that cannot be fixed. I've had to do this a few times although I only have 2 customers running SCO and don't do as much as i used to with it.

If you are responsible for a SCO system and its a production system with important data on it I would HIGHLY recommend looking into the two products that I mentioned. There might be others out there but I have personally worked with and still use the ones mentioned. Those products use a modified version of tar that does backup links, named pipes, special and device files. they create their own "rescue disks" that are much different from the SCO root and boot. These disks will partition the drive to what it was when they were created. install the tape drive that was present when they were created and look for a "Master" backup tape and restores the entire system from that tape.
The "Master" backup is a type of backup that you set in the software on what type of backup to run. You can also do incremental backups.


I had a system go down about 6 mos ago with a bad hardrive. They used Backup edge and did Master backups every night. These are the steps I followed.

1) had onsite tech replace drive
2) had onsite tech insert rescue disk 1
3) had the tech insert rescue disk 2 when prompted
4) had tech insert previous nights backup tape
5) waited two hours and the system was restored. Completely.

Its well worth the cost of the software. As with any backup plan you need to make sure your backups are good and keep your rescue disks current if you change hardware. For what its worth both products work great but I've gotten better support from Backup Edge tech support.