TCF Archives on UNIX - how do I restore from ?

Hi - I've been left some archives on dds-4 tape froma Sun 5.8 environment - the tapes say ufdumps of the servers in questioned but the archives are in TCF format.





Doea anyone know of the TCF format or howto extract from the tcf format ???





any help apreciated.





Ian

TCF Archives on UNIX - how do I restore from ?
Here is the start of a docuyment that explains the TCF format.





The Time Capsule File System





Introduction





The goal is to put files in a format so that they may be preserved


indefinitely. To achieve this goal, the problems to be addressed are


actually very similar to the problems faced in designing the Internet:





In the Internet domain, the fundamental problem is how to communicate


information from place to place in a heterogeneous network environment. To


solve this problem, the Internet Protocol (IP) specifies some simple


abstractions (IP packets, IP addresses, etc.) that can be supported on


almost any network hardware between hosts running very different operating


systems.





In designing the Time Capsule File System (TCFS), the problem is how to


communicate information through -time-, rather than through space. This is


an even more heterogeneous environment than IP must cope with, as we can


only -guess- what kinds of equipment the people in the future will be


using. To solve this problem, TCFS specifies some simple abstractions that


we believe will be easy to support far into the future.





The basic abstraction is the Time Capsule File (TCF). A TCF is a sequence


of bytes that contains a file bundled together with all of the other


information relevant to that file, such as the file's name, creation date,


author, the machine it was "dumped" from, when it was dumped, etc. TCFs


also contain their own length and a checksum so that they make minimal


demands on the storage media they may have to inhabit during their journey


into the future.





Design Goals: * easy to recognize the parts of the format


* extensible when we wish to add new fields





TCFS resembles Unix "ar" and "tar" format -- except without the bugs.





You concatenate TCFs together to form time capsules.





Each TCF is a self-contained entity -- if a collection of TCFs are all


created at the same time to form an archive of a file system hierarchy,


each individual TCF contains all the information necessary to reconstruct


the context it was taken from.





We only assume that file systems of the future will be capable of storing


sequences of 8-bit bytes. We are biased towards systems that store


characters in those bytes using the ASCII encoding, but nothing depends on


the survival of ASCII. We are also biased towards English. (Future


digital historians will probably have to be familiar with ASCII and


English, even if they don't use it themselves.)





If you prepare a large time capsule (by writing a tape, for example), you


should include the most recent copy of this document. Including some


relevant source code (which?) would be good too. Rosetta stones for ASCII


and English should also be designed and included.





It is recommended that TCFs -not- be subjected to any form of


data compression without taking steps to insure that the decompression


algorithm will remain known. (Will future digital historians know the


format used by Unix's `compress' program?)