Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

Considerations about data in the file system
Data within a file system might not be in the appropriate format to be accessed
if moved between different types of systems. For example, files stored in
proprietary binary formats often require conversion for use on the target platform.
Files containing databases might not be in a standard format that allows their
access when moving a file system between various systems, even if those systems
use the same byte order. Oracle 10g's Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespace
is a notable exception; if used, this feature provides a consistent format across
many platforms.
Some data is inherently portable, such as plain ASCII files. Other data is designed
to be portable and the applications that access such data are able to access it
irrespective of the system on which it was created, such as Adobe PDF files.
Note that the CDS facilities do not convert the end user data. The data is
uninterpreted by the file system. Only individual applications have knowledge of
the data formats, and thus those applications and end users must deal with this
issue. This issue is not CDS-specific, but is true whenever data is moved between
different types of systems.
Even though a user might have a file system with data that cannot be readily
interpreted or manipulated on a different type of system, there still are reasons
for moving such data by using CDS mechanisms. For example, if the desire is to
bring a file system off line from its primary use location for purposes of backing
it up without placing that load on the server or because the system on which it
will be backed up is the one that has the tape devices directly attached to it, then
using CDS to move the file system is appropriate.
An example is a principal file server that has various file systems being served
by it over the network. If a second file server system with a different operating
system was purchased to reduce the load on the original server, CDS can migrate
the file system instead of having to move the data to different physical storage
over the network, even if the data could not be interpreted or used by either the
original or new file server. This is a scenario that often occurs when the data is
only accessible or understood by software running on PCs and the file server is
UNIX or Linux-based.
File system migration
File system migration refers to the system management operations related to
stopping access to a file system, and then restarting these operations to access
the file system from a different computer system. File system migration might
be required to be done once, such as when permanently migrating a file system
to another system without any future desire to move the file system back to its
original system or to other systems. This type of file system migration is referred
Migrating data between platforms
File system considerations
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