[RjBass]

Hey im about to undertake a new project for my job. A local health dept has upgraded their network to a microsoft system coming from an old Unix based system from SCO. They have 10 years of data on tape backup that needs to be transfered over to the new microsoft server, will I need to get the old Unix server bak online to get that data to transfer or should I be ok with just loading it from the tape backups directly into the windows server?

The reason I ask is because I have never worked with Unix based systems before.

I will be in their office Sat to take a real look at what they have, I just wanted a little insight before I hit the ground running.

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It depends on how the data was written to the tapes. If it is tar format and you can connect the tape drive to the new system, then you should be able to read the tapes. If it is in dump format, then most likely you willl need to restore the data on the old system.

[Kemasa]

It depends on how the data was written to the tapes. If it is tar format and you can connect the tape drive to the new system, then you should be able to read the tapes. If it is in dump format, then most likely you willl need to restore the data on the old system.

[RjBass]

Thanks.

Well I finally got to take a look at the system on Saturday.

These people are really in a bind.

The original IT guy was a serious hacker and internet [bleep] lover. He set up the original server for the companey with the Sco Unixware 5.0. He also used a program called FilePro to store all the data. Apprently the guy was a huge fan of Unix, and since he possed such fantastic programming skills he was able to manipulate Unix to basicly do what he wanted it to do and thus was able to get other programs that wernt built for Unix to work on the Unix system.

To make a long story short, while the companey was operating just fine under his system, he was running a kiddie [bleep] site off of the same server. He was eventually busted and is now serving a couple years in the pen.

While in jail, the server went down and the new IT guy (who makes me look like the smartest IT guy on the planet) cant figure out how to get the data off of the tape backups and get them onto the Windows server.

I spent about 1 hour in the computer room assessing the situation and taking in this almost unreal story and I beleive I came up with a fairly simple solution.

They have another version of FilePro that is good for Windows. Im going to load it onto another machine that is good on the network, and see if I cant extract the data from the tape backups onto that machine. Now maybe I am looking at this to lightly, but from my position I cant see why that wont work. Tell me if im wrong.