Now I get the feeling the upshot is that if you have a Novell 6.5 system (or many ) then you need to upgrade them to OES 2015 to be able to do a restore direct to an NSS volume (and do some extra bits and pieces to maintain permissions).
Is this case? Has anyone done anything on Novell 6.5 servers? So far I have been able to do restores to an intermediary, and then copy and tweak permissions afterwards. I am just at the stage of trying to weigh up the time it will take to upgrade all the servers and do any other additional config extra required for this versus making do with a manual process. Not a straight forward decision given that our systems teams are endeavoring to migrate the systems based on Novell to Linux, but then again how long will that take and how many backup drives will fail in the interim?
The problem is that we don't have a way of connecting to NetWare servers directly to restore data. With Linux we create an ssh connection and leverage a data mover service on the target to restore the files. That's why in the User Guide we specifically call out that NetWare isn't supported.
As you've noted, for environments running NetWare 6.5 you'll have to restore the data elsewhere (doesn't even have to be OES--could be Windows) and then use a client machine to copy that restored data back to NetWare. Once you migrate from NetWare 6.5 to OES then you'll be able to restore files directly.
) then you need to upgrade them to OES 2015 to be able to do a restore direct to an NSS volume (and do some extra bits and pieces to maintain permissions).