A friend of mine is right now writing an improved manual on the backup utility for use within our company. He recently requested my help with one particular parameter of the "by_name" option.

The "by_name" was designed to enable restores based on UIC, and has several useful parameters. One of these parameters is "original" - what does this do? Our reference book describes it as "restoring a file according to the original UIC the file had." What does this mean? What is the "original UIC" of a file? We both feel that the option is redundant, since backup/by_name=[UIC] works just the same in restoring a file according to a particular UIC. Can someone please clarify this?

I don't see the /by_name option in the
manual, so it it probably obsolete.

http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/73final/6048/6048pro_contents_001.html#toc_chapter_7

No, it was my mistake. It should have been by_owner, not by_name. In any case, the manual you linked to does seem to provide a clearer explanation.

If I understand it right, by_owner changes the UIC of the restored file to whatever you set it (we were working on the assumption that it was used to select files for restore based on their having a particular UIC). In this case, by_owner=original would keep the original UIC's on the files, as opposed to changing them to something else.

What I understand, is that the meaning
depends on being used as an input or an
output parameter. An example

$ backup daily.bck /sav /by_own=user1 user$disk1:[temp] /by_own=user2

This will select all the files that belong to user1, and copy them to a directory making user2 the owner.