Re: AS/400 Backup questions (was: Probably very easy, Newbie question )

I have said in prior posts that in recent years there have been a variety of
different ways that we do our backups.

This is how we NOW do them.

1. Some time before backup to be done ... check out what is running on the
system, who is signed on, are they really active.

Example, with WRKACTJOB you can check the activity of a particular job ... if
1/2 an hour goes by & all it is doing is consuming CPU % ... no keystrokes,
no user waits for the system, no disk i/o etc., it is a good bet that person
has gone home leaving work station in middle of some program or menu ... I
can look in the stack to find out which.

If a user appears to be in such a boat, I send them a message, a POLITE
ULTIMATIM ... I am planning to soon do a backup, but if you are really here,
I have other things I can do & I can delay this so you can get your work to a
convenient point ... please let me know how long you plan to work tonite ...
if I do not hear from you within 1/2 hour, I will assume you have gone home
leaving your session in middle of stuff & I will kill your session.

I do this so as not to eat up the company phone bill making phone calls every
nite & leaving voice mail all over the place.

2. Tape drive cleaning (not every nite) & Initialize the tape (I use a menu
option setup in advance for this... INZTAP is the command) & plan whatever me
doing this evening so I can see where doing the backup will be a convenient
point.

If orange light on tape drive
that means we have left it too late to do a proper cleaning
so lets clean it twice

If green light blinking on tape drive
wait until solid before doing next step

Many nites this week I did the backup before testing some new update software.

We used to have M36 environment to bring down.

3. Get all jobs to a close, including printers.  In some cases I am in JOBQ
putting stuff on hold & jotting down what I put on hold so I know what to
release later.

Notice that when putting on hold ... I work from the LAST job that will run,
backwards, then after backup, I work from the NEXT job that will run,
forwards.

WRKJOBQ gets you at all the JOBQ in your library list ... WRKJOBQ F4 to be
sure of getting at all the ones in the system.

Same kind of thing with reports.

4. Stop All Subsystems.

There will be people here who say that this is handled by the GO SAVE 21 &
you not need to do it twice, and then I talk about jobs that we have problems
with & they say tell IBM its a bug, well there has been multiple talk about
3rd party stuff that violates IBM rules ... we just find that we have NO
PROBLEMS when we do it our way & we used to have problems when we did it
another way.

5. GO SAVE 21

There is the screen that lists all the stuff involved in the backup
then a screen to fill in / adjust some blanks & this is what we do

TAP01 (default)
N   Prompt
N   Check
*NOTIFY because we think we know what we are doing
*CURRENT    (default)
*ALL servers

scroll to second screen

N (default)
N (default)
Y (reply list)

If green light blinking on tape drive
wait until solid before doing next step

After pressing enter, after a few minutes (if it is running without a problem)
we will see progress reports across the bottom of the screen.

example

40 of 175 libraries processed.  250 objects saved from DOCS4AL.

This means it got done with the library mentioned & is working on whatever
the next one is.

It saves some system stuff before you start seeing these library progress
reports so don't worry if 10-15 minutes before you see first progress report.

I usually start the thing going, then take a potty break, then see if anyone
left any free goodies in the lunch room, and when I return to the 400 it has
been long enough to see if it is running good.

Also, screen saver might kick in before first progress report arrives.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)