UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hello

Helping a friend who had an accounting program called multisoft, hasn't used it for 4 years. I believe it was installed on a Unix box. He has a tax audit and needed to switch on the pc / server to access the data but the hard drive was beeping... totally dead.

He said he had a backup on a zip drive and looking at it, it has a single file called chkpoint , 160mb, no file extension.

Is a chkpoint file a default Unix backup file or a third party Unix backup program ?

I believe it was on a Unix box because when I open the file in notepad, yes get all the unreadable characters ...lol... but also can see dev/tty2a and dev/lp0 and usr/cpoint.. on some lines of data.

Appreciate any pointers and I know its a long shot but anyone got the multisoft program / install media... lol

Thanks

Filenames for unix backups aren't necessarily important and as such there may not be a standard. This is likely just a "file" that can be read back by the appropriate tool, but it will be trial and error over which command wrote the file.

You might try tar -tvf chkpoint or if it might be compress, it will be tar -tzvf chkpoint or zcat chkpoint | tar -tvf -

It might be a cpio backup, or ufsdump or any number of 3rd party might have been used to create it. What OS are you able to read the file with? We might be able to get a bit more of a clue with the tools available.


If it was a .dmp then it might well be a database backup, but that's not guaranteed. Even a .tar.Z might not be a compressed-tar file.



Robin
(What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet)

Hi Bill,

If you have access to a unix system, it might be worth running file chkpoint failing that if the file is a tar archive or some other types you may have a chance of accessing the contents of the file using "WinRAR" or something similar.

Regards

Gull04

Since you can open the file in notepad, can you
post the first 100 lines of the file?
Are there any diskettes or cd's floating around his office that might be bootable and contain the restore program(s)?
/dev/tty2a and /dev/lp0 are both valid file names for SCO products Xenix and SCO Unix.