This methodology can give you a scanable tape but it does increase your
i/o load and elapsed time quite a bit. If you have enough spare DASD,
you could do all of your production backups to DASD during your backup
window and then move the CMS files to tape after your backup window. But
it requires quite a bit of DASD, I could only get 2 3390-m9 volumes to a
3390-m9 storage volume, so I needed 16 spare DASD for the then 32
production DASD.
Having a standard VOL1 label on the tape is easy to do in your
controlling exec, either by forward spacing past it if it exists when
you get the tape mounted or you can write one yourself. I read the label
and then rewrite it adding the userid of the server my backup is running
in.
The DDR tape data includes information about the volume dumped. It
should not be too hard to write an exec to read a tape and report on the
label and ddr contents. Eventually that processing could be added to the
TAPEMAP program which already knows about TAPE and VMFPLC2 data content.
BTW, we just had our Disaster Recovery exercise and my 6 3590 tapes
stacked with 40 3390-m9 volumes got restored in 1 hour and 9 minutes.
/Tom Kern
David Boyes wrote:
A suggestion: In place of the DDR on the S disk, use CMSDDR
(downloadable from the VM Download library at www.vm.ibm.com/download),
and dump the volumes to a CMS file with a meaningful name (like <vaddr>
<date>). Then you can use TAPE DUMP or MOVEFILE to move the files to
tape (also gives you SL multivolume tape support, which DDR doesn't do).
This gives you a easy way to scan the tapes for a particular volume
using CMS utilities (TAPEMAP is your friend) and generate listings of
what disk volume is on what tape. Costs you a free disk volume, but it
makes life a LOT easier if all you have is the basic system. Be sure to
put a copy of DDR2CMSX MODULE as the first file on the tape to ensure
you have it in DR situations.
You also may want to look into getting a copy of IBM's Backup Manager.
While it's fairly difficult to set up, it is reasonably priced and
provides a way to automate dumps without breaking the bank.
