Backup-File Format is a data archive format used by the
IBM AIX operating system. It stores copies of files in an analogous manner to the
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
tar
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black bit ...
format.
BFF files can be created by the AIX "backup" command, and read by the corresponding "restore" command. There is no standard file suffix, although some files use
.bff. However, files can be identified programmatically by their "magic number" in the first 4 bytes. This can be either
0x09006bea or
0x09006fea, in big-endian byte order.
The Backup-File Format is also used for AIX software packages.
Managing AIX Server Farms
Chapter 6
References
Unix archivers and compression-related utilities
Computer file formats
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