Re: Back ups with High Availability Web Server

On 13-Nov-2013 15:25 -0800, Matt Olson wrote:

So back to my point of putting in a design change request to have
this fixed. If we can do SWA with the data in SAVSYS we can finally
do bare metal backups like you can do on Windows Platforms (using
Volume shadow copy), or Linux platforms (using LVM Snapshots). There
would never be a thread about backing up the system while trying to
keep everything running ever again. <<SNIP>>

I am not so sure it would stop such discussions. Even as seen in this thread, as in others: The issue remains, having to first /end/ jobs [or otherwise, somehow forcing any jobs to remove their conflicting locks] so the Save While Active could allocate the objects it will save, in order to establish a checkpoint. The SWA does not magically enable breaking locking protocol so it can dump the data to media in a possibly inconsistent state... such that the integrity of the saved data would be indeterminate. Seems some people think that the SWA can\should both break locking protocols *and* effect a save with full integrity. While just /a computer to be coded to do much/ so there would be the possibility to make the currently not-possible the future is-possible, the capability to save currently locked objects is not already part of the SWA as designed and implemented... so simply extending SWA to SAVSYS would *not* be a solution, best I can infer.

Backing up an OS (every single storage block of it) should be
something the OS can do out of the box. In this day and age I expect
nothing less. If it doesn't provide it, I look at it with
inferiority.

The desire to have /yet another/ copy of the OS when that and the updates already exist and are available, is often a bit extreme; i.e. not consistent with the Service Level Agreements and Recovery Time Objectives [SLA, SLO\SLT, RTO\RPO] requirements. What I mostly want to ensure gets backed-up, is the user data. Depending on the outage and recovery methods and the availability\recovery requirements, I might possibly never require a copy of an actual SAVSYS; i.e. the IBM-provided media quite possibly could suffice. I could even backup my PTFs that will be the applied maintenance, if that helped ensure a recovery could complete within time requirements; although doing so will not prevent an IPL to apply that maintenance again, at least I would not have to take the hit to download those PTFs again.