RE: Back up questions

Mike said:

>I have a backup question for you. We are starting 
>to have problems with our backups and getting 
>everything on our tapes. 

Buy more tapes. ASAP.

>We have one system going across 2 tapes now, but we 
>have to initialized them daily. 

Buy more tapes.  Enough for multi-generational backups.  A merely adequate
plan is to have a set for each day of the week, so if you need 3 tapes/day
and you run a 6 day operation you'll need 18 tapes.  Make sure the volume
labels reflect the day and not something generic like 'Backup'.  Then you
can track tape failures better.  Make them expire in a week so you can't
accidentally write on them before their time.

A better plan is to have enough tapes for two weeks and rotate them.  

Pull one day's tapes a week and store offsite.  Better, store all sets
offsite except the day before yesterdays.

>I have heard about SAVCHGOBJ but we aren't 100% 
>sure how that works.

Run, do not walk to the Backup & Recovery guide.  You already need it even
if you don't realise it yet.

>We are getting to the point that we can't do 
>a single tape anymore does anyone have any 
>suggestions to either cut down the size of 
>the backup or to change our backup procedures?

If management are happy buying tapes instead of tape drives, you'll just
have to live with a longer backup window and tape swapping.  You may get the
sense that backups are important to me, and you'd be right.  My life was
saved by offsite backups and a rotating two week tape set with monthlies,
quarterlies and yearlies on top of that.  As well as SAVSYS after
configuration changes and PTFs.  As well as RTVCFGSRC to a source file.

Do your hair a favour and don't end up pulling it out because of inadequate
backups.  Remember that a major source of problems is me...I mean some
programmer deploying a program that subtly corrupts data.  Having two weeks
worth of backups can get me... some programmer out of a jam when that
happens.  If.  If that happens.
  --buck