Dumping advfs file systems to a file on disk in Digital/Tru64 UNIX

In preparation for migrating my Digital UNIX environment to a larger HDD on my Personal Workstation, I needed to backup a couple of file systems containing install kits I would want to use again on the new install. Rather than backup to an old DDS tape like I had done previously, I took the route of writing the backup set to a file on the hard disk and transferring it to my PC over FTP.

I created the dump on Digital UNIX 4.0D and intend to restore it on Digital UNIX 4.0E which I recently acquired media for and would like to use on my Personal Workstation as I believe it is the version normally shipped on these machines since it adds USB support. I doubt I will use the USB support but I am also interested to see if it has better support for the IDE optical drive on the machine as 4.0D refused to install from it and I had to connect up an external SCSI DVD-ROM drive instead. To the best of my knowledge this is also the last Digital UNIX branded version of the operating system before the rebrand to Compaq/HP Tru64 UNIX.

To the main point of this post, how exactly do we dump an advfs file system to a file? I used the command below:

vdump -0 -f /backup/kits.vdump -v /kits

-0 Specifies the backup level and 0 causes the entire fileset to be backed up to the destination location
-f [path] Specifies the file or device (e.g. tape drive) where the fileset will be written
-v Displays the names of the files being backed up
The final option is the path for the file system being backed up, which in this is case is mounted at “/kits”

I chose to call the backup file “kits.vdump” so I knew that this file was a vdump backup as by default the file will just not have an extension if you don’t specify one.

Once I have installed Digital UNIX 4.0E (which you can expect another post about!) I will write another post on how to perform a restore from this file.