The behavior of hifa_restoredata (formerly hif_restoredata) has been changed such that starting with CASA 5.1.1, it now requires the pipeline manifest in order for it to work. The old hif_restoredata has been removed from 5.1.1, which means the ability to restore data without a manifest no longer exists. Therefore, CASA 5.1.1 or newer will not be able to restore data archived from earlier cycles (which did not have the pipeline manifest archived). This includes all data taken before October 01, 2017.

If you would like to run scriptForPI.py to restore datasets originally calibrated in a pipeline version prior to 5.1.1, please do not use CASA 5.1.1 or higher. CASA 4.7.2 was the last pipeline release before 5.1.1. We generally recommend using scriptForPI.py in the same version of CASA reported in the README file of the scheduling block. The CASA version can also be found in the logfiles of the log directory. A full list of which CASA versions that can be used to restore data with scriptForPI.py for each cycle is here: https://almascience.nrao.edu/processing/science-pipeline

The error CASA prints is:
2017-10-26 16:36:59 INFO: Saving context to 'pipeline-20171026T163659.context'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-2-e3e68ac9dbd5> in <module>()
----> 1 execfile('scriptForPI.py')

/home/casa/contrib/AIV/science/qa2/scriptForPI.py in <module>()
393 else:
394 print contfiles
--> 395 sys.exit('ERROR: found more than one *cont.dat file in directory "calibration"')
396
397 print "Directory \"working\" set up for pipeline re-run:"

../../script/casa_piperestorescript.py in <module>()
12 h_save() # SACM/JAO - Finish weblog after fixes
13 h_init() # SACM/JAO - Restart weblog after fixes
---> 14 hif_restoredata (vis=['uid___A002_Xc3a8fe_X2454'], session=['session_1'], ocorr_mode='ca')
15 finally:
16 h_save()

NameError: name 'hif_restoredata' is not defined