Thank you Helen,

I had a disk crash so I was absorbed restoring ..

gbak -c d:\vas_db\/VAS.bak localhost:d:\vas_db\VAS.fdb -user sysdba
-password yourpwd

your proposal seems to work.

the restore operation is running now for some minutes.
However I get very many (some thousand ??) messages of the form:

gbak: do not recognize table attribute 0 -- continuing

does this point to a serious problem or can I safely ignore it?

thanks again
robert