RE: Disaster Recovery test scenario

We've toyed with something similar: just restoring the bare minimum
libraries in a 'first pass' and doing the others after production is up,
but the extra hassle doesn't seem worthwhile in our environment.  In a
recovery situation, we've got so many hours to meet our SLA and frankly,
it's not a problem to restore the whole system.  The situation is
improved with tape drives (and the other hardware) getting faster and
faster.

Since we have our own DR system, we're moving to the following backup
strategy:

Monthly: SAVE/21.  Take to DR system & restore everything but the OS.
Then off-site.
Daily: Save production libraries fully and do a SAVCHGOBJ on everything
else.  Also do a SAVCFG, SAVSECDTA, SAV, etc.  All of the daily saves
(except the production data libs) use UPDHST(*NO). Tapes are off-sited.
We're using the save-while-active feature for one partition while we
have the luxury of bringing things down on the other.

So, a full recovery is the latest monthly followed by the latest daily.
But since the monthly will already be applied, the recovery is reduced
to the latest daily.  It'll still be a fair amount of stuff to restore,
but it's simple enough that I can delegate it and we're testing our
ability to read the tapes every month.