Re: Creating nightly full backups (Lukas Beeler)

You programmers are right.  You can only get the *SAVSYS when the 
system is in restricted mode.  Not really that big of a deal because 
that only changes when you put PTFs or upgrade OS.  Do a full system 
save and send that off site, at the same time make a *SAVSYS tape that 
you can leave 'at the office' if it's that important.

Do yourself a favor and start using BRMS.  Every night make sure the 
last thing you do is backup the object information in the BRMS 
databases.  When you run the maintenance job everyday (expires tapes, 
moves them from location to location, etc), you get an awesome report 
that tells you step by step how to restore the system.

As a side note, ask the Windows guys if they've ever tried to restore 
that *full system save* on another system?  I bet they haven't.  
Windows doesn't like being restored to different hardware.  Our 
Distributed Conmputing team moved to running alot the Windows servers 
on VMWare just for that reason since VMWare vitualizes the hardware. 
Hmm, where have I seem a system that does that for you?  When we went 
to our IBM disaster recovery test, I would restore the Mainframe (in a 
VM partition) and iSeries without any problems and they'd be pounding 
their heads on the wall.

I don't know if you have a disaster recovery contract with anyone or 
need one for that matter, but we have ours with IBM.  In addition to 
the nice report that BRMS, IBM supplies me with a step by step screen 
shot writeup to IPL the system from tape, selecting disk from DST, etc.

m.
> message: 3
> date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 08:07:44 +0100
> from: "Lukas Beeler" <l.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> subject: Creating nightly full backups
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I work at a rather small iSeries ISV. 
> 
> We have a 270 with around 70GB DASD, around 25GB used. This 
> machine runs
> V5R3M0.
> 
> A few days ago, i had an interesting discussion with our developers
> while thinking about a new backup concept (we just replaced our old
> windows 2000 server with a windows 2003 one).
> 
> On our windows and linux machines, i run nightly full backups, which
> allow for an easy and fast system restore. These backups are 
> completelyautomated, incur no downtime at all, our administative 
> personal just has
> to change the tapes.
> 
> On our iSeries however, we don't have anything like it. We do daily
> backups of our data and program libraries, but this requires our ERP
> software to shut down. Also, monthly (SAVLIB *NONSYS) and system 
> backups(SAVSYS) require an attended backup.
> 
> I would like to get this process up to date, running a nightly full
> backup which contains a SAVLIB *NONSYS and a SAVSYS, which should 
> allowus to restore using a single tape. Our iSeries developers 
(which,
> contrary to myself have a large amount of experience on the iSeries)
> said that this couldn't be done.
> 
> We do have BRMS licensed, but we don't use it (yet). I also read 
> about a
> "Save while Active" feature, which should allow to save librarys 
while
> they are in use.
> 
> Is there really no possibility to achieve something like that? Our
> iseries system was far more expensive than our windows machine
> (including all software licenses), but doesn't have the 
> possibility to
> do a decent, unattended full backup? I learned to like this platform,
> but this looks like a rather big drawback
> 
> Hopefully you guys can tell me that we just didn't look at the right
> place.
> 
> Thanks in Advance,
> 
> Lukas Beeler
>