I've spent just enough time around systems driven by old IBM mainframes to realize that they're pretty darned good at data integrity and at uptime, but they mak

I've spent just enough time around systems driven by old IBM mainframes to realize that they're pretty darned good at data integrity and at uptime, but they make up for it by being an IT nightmare in most other respects. In this case, it sounds very much like the backup servers were running the wrong version of some user interface programmed in an arcane IBM programming language from the 1970s that is built entirely around the record-oriented database typical of a machine like the AS/400. Hilarity!