All,

First I'd like to express my appreciation to this list and all who replied / read my novice ramblings and pleas for help.  All responses were a real pick me up while I was in despair.

[sorry if this is long winded]

Ok now to the fix...

It really boiled down to the damn fifo and my lack of understanding them.  Unfortunately I'm not the kind of person who can read a manual and readily grasp it's concepts, I'm more of "lets do it first and see what happens" type of guy.

I never did figure out how to restore just the tar file w/o using a fifo.  All config variations kept giving the same behaviour.  I could watch the Storage Daemon read the Bacula volume and I saw where Bacula created the named pipe "file".  The process wasn't putting the streaming data into the pipe.   While I could not find where the data type was set, I agree that FT_FIFO type must have been the cause of this stubborn behaviour.  Very frustrating...

So I was schooled by one a senior developer at work on named pipes, un-named pipes, and fifo behaviour.  Now the words in the manual made a little more sense.

So it starts in the ClientRunBeforeJob in the MailRestore.bash script.  The previous admin used fifo and set up the job just like the instructions said.  Specifically opening a named pipe with the mkfifo cmd then running a tar xpf of that named pipe.  This put the Bacula backup job back in the original directory.  Since I didn't have the original dir my efforts in relocating the data and just getting a "tar" file were folly.  Recall I changed 2 things in the Bacula restore, restore client and location.  This was needed because the original location was no longer available.

The restore was looking for a process reading from the fifo [as was suggested by Martin]

2 changes were needed in the MailRestore.bash.  1) [this was probably not really needed but done anyway] Modified a path statement to match what was changed when I mod'd the restore option in the Bacula restore.  2) [the biggie] replaced the "tar xpf" line with a "cat > mail.tar" line

[Original]    tar -xpf ${fifoDir}/mail.tar </dev/null &

This worked!!  I now have my data in a tar file.  Yes, I've extracted the contents and all looks good.

Thank you again for all the comments and help.  I'm sure I'll be back with more adventures.

Respectfully,

--Kenny