Re: Saving a hosted LPAR to save all.

I'm not at all worried about them dropping SAVSTG. I believe that was announced a decade ago but don't quote me on that. I did speak to some folks about it when it was announced and they also had no issue. Remember that this code was created when tape drives outstripped the ability of IBM i (Then OS/400) to gather data fast enough to keep up with the fastest tape drives of the time (3490 or 3590 maybe??). So having this ability to simply read sequential sectors at a max drive speed helped cut the backup window for some users.

Initially you needed an IDENTICAL disk configuration to do a restore from this, later chiefly due to pressure by Al Barsa IBM relaxed this to allow a restore to any system that would run the O/S, had a large enough load source (Same or bigger as original) and had enough disk to hold the entire SAVSTG.

But think about the real world use of SAVSTG. It's ALL or NOTHING on a restore and it's definitely a rare day when you can restore 100.00% of the system crushing everything else or because the old system is now a 'smoking hole'. Even then you'll need to add daily backups etc to get your data reasonably current. So the actual value of SAVSTG just isn't there any more and for IBM to spend development dollars maintaining it makes little sense.


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
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On 4/19/2017 7:03 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:

That's not very reassuring. IBM has dropped the SAVSTG command. I fear
that too many people were getting burnt trying to restore in a situation
less than a perfect match in hardware. Then again I talked to a LUG
member who initiated a few hundred machines that way.


Rob Berendt