Whatever you have, make sure that you have documentation in place describing how the catalogs are backed up and how they can be recovered in your production system and DR. Have jobs in place so you are not trying to create them at 3am. THEN TEST IT.
We use dedicated small non-sms volumes. We want nothing else on the same volume as the catalog. We back up all our catalogs every 12 hours and also create an alternate mastercat. We also back up all VVDS at the same time. Our backup data sets go to disk instead of tape. There are two sms pools for the backups. A primary and an alternate. Each pool's volumes are on different control units. Each pool's data sets have a different HLQ that are in different UCATS. The print output from each backup goes to the disk pool so we can look at the output if the system is having catalog problems. We don't need the catalog to find the backup data sets or the output describing them. We have complete documentation and recovery procedures including jobs on our group web page so we can get the documentation from anywhere anytime. We may go a bit far with our catalog philosophy, but if anything happens to a catalog and we lose data, our jobs would be in jeopardy. Catalogs do break. Richard J Habres AVP - Merrill Lynch Mainframe Storage Ops - Dasd Administration -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ted MacNEIL Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 2:01 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ICF Catalogs on SMS managed volumes >I spent the next week fixing catalog entries and moving all catalogs to >non-SMS. I'd advise against SMS managed catalogs volumes Things have changed. I've had both, and I'd recommend SMS management, now. Why manually manage when you don't have to? - Too busy driving to stop for gas! -------------------------------------------------------- This message w/attachments (message) may be privileged, confidential or proprietary, and if you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, do not use or share it and delete it. Unless specifically indicated, this message is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of any investment products or other financial product or service, an official confirmation of any transaction, or an official statement of Merrill Lynch. Subject to applicable law, Merrill Lynch may monitor, review and retain e-communications (EC) traveling through its networks/systems. The laws of the country of each sender/recipient may impact the handling of EC, and EC may be archived, supervised and produced in countries other than the country in which you are located. This message cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. This message is subject to terms available at the following link: http://www.ml.com/e-communications_terms/. By messaging with Merrill Lynch you consent to the foregoing. -------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
