Hi I am trying to read files created by a Pervasive database application in a NetWare 4.11 environment into a Windows 2000 Server environment. I have taken a tape backup of the database data in the NetWare environment and am attempting to restore it to the Windows environment. The software that is restoring the tape to Windows is Backup Exec and it is complaining about “Sparse files” and is erroring. I have contacted Backup Exec support and they can offer no help with this. It seems that NetWare writes these sparse files in a database environment. Is there any way that these files can be converted into a Windows compatible format within NetWare or any switch or command that I can issue on the NetWare server to persuade NetWare to write files in a more conventional format? Failing that, is there any utility that I can use in a Windows environment that can read NetWare sparse files? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Regards Jules

i am not sure if this idea deals with your issue. if you backup data from a netware server which uses SMS ( Storage Management System , SMDR -TSA's etc ) you can only restore to a netware volume. so try to copy these files to the ms - pc. regards mike pacholke http://www.hsinet.de http://www.alte-netware.de http://www.old-netware.com regards mike pacholke www.hsinet.de www.alte-netware.de www.old-netware.com

I think you may be going about this the wrong way, I'm not too familiar with Pervasive, but SQL / MySQL, etc offers simple options of dumping a database into a .SQL file, which can then be imported to another database server - regardless of the OS it's hosted on. I would look into doing a dump/import rather than trying to transfer the database via backup exec