ontape restore problem

A customer want to restore the data from the tape, the date of backup file is about 2002. and No one remember the informix version, How to know the informix version from the backup file? thanks for your help.

original post: A customer want to restore the data from the tape, the date of backup file is about 2002. and No one remember the informix version, How to know the informix version from the backup file? thanks for your help. Response: I think you can try to do the ontape -r (with any version installed) and after you mount the tape ontape -r will print the archive tape information which I believe would have the version...then if the version of ontape didn't match the tape it would then print an error. I did a quick test with a 12.10.FC7 archive and tried to restore it using 12.10.FC12 and my screen output looks like this: ontape -r -t `pwd`/l0.1210FC7 Please mount tape 1 on /usr4/pmrs/TS1093490/repro/pri/l0.1210FC7 and press Return to continue ... Archive Tape Information Tape type: Archive Backup Tape Online version: IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 12.10.FC7 Archive date: Tue Sep 11 09:42:23 2018 User id: informix Terminal id: /dev/pts/140 Archive level: 0 Tape device: STDIO Tape blocksize (in k): 128 Tape size (in k): 0 Tape number in series: 1 Backup data version is not compatible with Online version: IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 12.10.FC12 Jacques Renaut HCL Informix Advanced Support

Just in case Jaques' approach does not work against such an old tape, you may also be able to simply do a "more" of the tape. I did that on a recent archive and, while it had many CTRL characters and other unprintable characters, the version was plainly readable: M-^?M-^?M-^?M-^?M-^?M-^?^L^EM-^U^GgArchive Backup TapeIBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.50.FC6WESat Aug 18 23:00:01 2018informix?STDIOM-^@^A >> original post: >> >> A customer want to restore the data from the tape, the date of backup file >> is about 2002. and No one remember the informix version, How to know the >> informix version from the backup file? >> >> thanks for your help. >> >> Response: >> >> I think you can try to do the ontape -r (with any version installed) and >> after you mount the tape ontape -r will print the archive tape information >> which I believe would have the version...then if the version of ontape >> didn't match the tape it would then print an error.