[Simh] how to move vms backup tapes to the emulator

[Rick Caldwell]

I have several vms tapes in backup format that I would like to move to 
the Vax emulator.   I'm looking
for a smooth way to do this.  From the doc it appears I could read tapes 
in tpc format but this would
require stopping the emulator to attach the file and restarting the 
emulator if I understand how the
attach works (at least I think the tape image file is opened when 
attached so once the emulation is
started the file is attached to the simulated device rather than opening 
and closing on allocation
and deallocation so you could replace the file with the emulator 
running).   It would also seem that
I would need to find a way to first convert the tape to tpc format 
without a Vax.  As I have several tapes to
read and more than 1 user this probably wouldn't work to well.  There 
seem to be several utilities in
the tools subdirectory of the simh distribution but they don't seem to 
do what I would like to do from
what documentation there is.

Another thought is to build the vmsbackup.c program on unix/linux and 
read the tape and save to disk,
then run vmsbackup again to make a on disk saveset which then could be 
ftp'ed to the emulator and then
backup could then be run in the emulator on the backup saveset.  Most of 
this could be scripted but it seems
like a lot of steps and a lot of temp disk space so was wondering if 
someone had a better solution .

Rick

-- 
Have you noticed that a "slight tax increase" costs us at least two
hundred dollars a year, but a "substantial tax cut" saves us maybe thirty cents?

rickc at dallas.oilfield.slb.com