Hi all,

I have a large number of backup tapes which were originally written with the AIX "backup" command. I now need to convert these to "tar" format, but unfortunately I no longer have access to an AIX machine. I have been able to connect the old tape drive (3590) to a Linux box and it works fine...

My question is, does anyone have any suggestions on how I might convert these tapes from AIX backup/restore format to GNU tar format? I don't really care about preserving the file permissions - I just need the actual files & directories.

Is there a Linux port of backup/restore I could compile up? If not, does anyone know what the data structure looks like so I can write a C program to extract the files? Is there a cpio/dd command which might do the trick?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

You don't say what kind of Linux box it is. If you're using a x86 Linux box, you'll still have endian issues with the data.
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It's x86, however a "strings < /dev/tape" reveals the data is readable just as it is.

It would also be no trouble writing a little C program to do a byte swap or endian change. I just don't know enough about the structure of the AIX "backup" data stream.

I guess I'm hoping someone's going to turn around and say "here's a cpio command which reads that data" or "here's the URL for the source code tarball for the Linux port of AIX's backup/restore utiltiy... Here's hoping, anyway :-)