Recovering binary zonefiles from Bind 9.9

So, found this hint after a quick search, http://serverfault.com/questions/488092/binary-zone-file-on-bind9 the binary zonefiles can for instance appear when doing slave transfer between master and a slave node.

If you then need to upgrade the slave node to master, converting the zonefile from raw to text is what you'll want to do first.

# convert raw zone file "example.net.raw", containing data for zone example.net,
# to text-format zone file "example.net.text"
#
#  (command)     (format options)   (output file)      (zone origin)  (input file)
named-compilezone  -f raw -F text  -o example.net.text  example.net    example.net.raw

Not sure when you'll want to go the other way, but it's very similar

# convert text format zone file "example.net.text", containing data for zone
# example.net, to raw zone file "example.net.raw"
#
#   (command)     (format options)   (output file) (zone origin)  (input file)
named-compilezone -f text -F raw -o example.net.raw example.net example.net.text

Then of course, you have to edit the relevant zones in named.conf telling it that it's no longer a slave server but a master, but that should be fairly trivial if you're running a master/slave setup to begin with :-)