4.x can't read 5.x dump?

[Jaime Bozza]

>There's no theoretical reason why the formats used by dump and
>restore shouldn't be forward and backward compatible, allowing
>an older restore (to an older filesystem type) to pick out the
>parts of the dump which make sense to it while ignoring parts
>which it doesn't understand.
>
>But they aren't, so it can't, so you're out of luck.

This is a pretty interesting issue that I didn't realize.  I've
regularly
restored dumps from a Solaris 8 machine to my FreeBSD 4.x machines.  (We
had data volumes on some old Solaris machines that I replaced with
FreeBSD.)  I guess FreeBSD and Solaris volumes are similar enough that
the restore just worked.


Jaime Bozza