The question was how to move a large system from one machine to a completely new system, including disk drives, in the quickest way possible minimizing downtime. In this particular case, it is a 7x24 shop and its online backup to a DLT4000 takes 16 hours!

Stan Sieler came up with an interesting approach to this particular problem, an approach that can be extended to solve a variety of problems in large 7x24 shops.

(Requires being on MPE/iX 6.0 PP 1)

buy a Seagate 36 GB disk drive (ST136403LW, about $1100 in an external case).

configure the Seagate on both the old system and the new system.

connect the Seagate on the old system

volutil/newset the Seagate to be a new volume set, "XFER"

REMEMBER: VOLUME SET NAMES CAN (AND SHOULD) BE SHORT NAMES!

do one (or more) STORE to disk using compression with the target disk being the new Seagate drive.

Note that TurboStore's store-to-disk module is smart enough to create another "reel" when the MPE/iX 4GB file limit is reached. From the TurboStore/iX documentation:

If STORE fills up the first disk file specified for the backup, it creates as many additional disk files as needed, or uses existing disk files. They will be built with the same default file characteristics as the first disk file. The naming convention used for additional files is to append the reel number to the end of the first disk filename. The resulting name will be a HFS-syntax name. For example, if STORE needed three disk files to store all files, they would be named:

/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC

/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC.2

/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC.3

Example:

:newgroup xfer.sys

:newgroup xfer.sys; onvs=XFER

:altgroup xfer.sys; homevs=XFER

:file xfer; dev=99 (where 99 is the XFER disk)

:store @.@.@ ; *xfera; compress

when the entire system is backed up onto the XFER disk, VSCLOSE it, unplug it (caution: the safest approach is to power off your system first)

attach the new disk to the new system (see caution above) and reboot

set up the XFER group on the new system

:newgroup xfer.sys

:altgroup xfer.sys; homevs=XFER

restore the data

:file xfer; dev=99 (or whatever ldev XFER is)

:restore *xfer; /; olddate;create (if necessary)

...

Obviously, this leaves out interesting things like setting up UDCs, directory structure, etc. The point of this note is to introduce the concept of using a 36 GB disk drive as a transfer media.

Another variation on this theme is to use large, inexpensive, disks for archive purposes. Instead of purchasing often expensive archival devices such as CD or optical jukeboxes, just throw the information on some cheap hard disks inside a cheap enclosure and hang it off your system. Users then have access to all this information online. It might not be right for everybody, but in many cases it is.