Problem:

Company A has been using a large VAX for several years and has recently been experiencing trouble with it.  They have switched to using a VAX emulator whichis working quite well for them with the single exception of their tape drive.  The tape drive has been moved to a Windows system. They have some older tapes which they need restored to their VAX system.

Solution:

One of their emplyees had heard about NetExplorer and decided to try it.  It purported to be able to read VMS backup tapes on a Windows tape drive and copy the savesets from the tape to their VMS system.  Then they should be able to use VMS backup to restore files from the newly created saveset on disk. They tried it.  They worried about the block size since they knew that Backup would only read files with the same block size as the saveset ws written.  But, NetExplorer had restored the saveset correctly and they were able to retrieve all the old files! Not only that!  They could now use VMS Backup to create new savesets on disk.  Then use NetExplorer to transfer these savesets directly to the tape drive on the Windows system.  An added benefit was that the new tapes coulc be read directly on a VMS system so they were able to ship some tapes to a different facility.