Re: Full save with IASP -- MIDRANGE-L

Off the wall and might not work for you.

If you create an optical image catalog and put in there one *REALLYBIG image. Just one. No need to match to real image sizes here so make it be big enough to hold 10-15% of this stuff.

Create a virtual device perhaps such as "OPTVRTIFS1" and mount the catalog and it's one volume in there. Initialize it with inzopt.

Now that thing is available under /QOPT/<volume ID> and you can write to it or read from it. You can delete stuff and edit stuff etc. If you fill it up add another virtual optical device and another image catalog also with only one virtual image and mount that.

Write performance isn't stellar but read performance is pretty good. After all it's still on disk.

Great what did this buy us? Well now you can back up that one big object instead of potentially many thousands of little objects. This easily will run at the speed of your tape device with near zero overhead.

Some cautions:

Security is not as solid but if it's application controlled not a huge deal.

You will need to LODIMGCLG OPTION(*UNLOAD) in order to save them because while loaded they will be flagged ALWSAVE(*NO) automatically. Of course be sure to LODIMGCLG OPTION(*LOAD) to restore access after the backup.

If you create the disk as say 1TB (the max) it will actually consume 1TB and also will then be a 1TB thing you need to actually back up! So you are better off if practical to plan to use several of these each with perhaps 10% of the stuff and just make more as needed.

Some application changes MAY be required but note that you can create symbolic links into the /QOPT directory so your application may not know that the files have 'moved'.

If you issue the *makeamess command with a bunch of the files on one of these images you will need to restore that image, mount it, get the files from it, and delete it. But if the majority of this sfuff is archived that should not happen.

Note that if the stuff is 100% archive you can LODIMGCLG WRTPTC(*ALL) to prevent all changes or deletions.

If new writes are all going into the 'latest' image then you don't need to even back up all the image catalogs every night. Maybe just monthly and back up only the active one each night.

Discus.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 4/26/2018 11:06 AM, Musselman, Paul wrote:

Justin--

Any chance some of those IFS objects can be archived into SAVFs? We did some pruning that way and saved significant time on our backups!

Of course, if everyone wants instant access to the objects, this won't work. You could build a retrieval system to restore objects from the SAVFs on-demand. "This is left as an exercise for the student."

Do you use ASYNCBRING? "Achieve faster IFS save times using SAV with ASYNCBRING" https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/IBM+i+Technology+Updates/page/Achieve+faster+IFS+save+times+using+SAV+with+ASYNCBRING

It's a shame that 'buy' is not in your future. If it's a case of funds being non-existant, I understand.

If it's just a matter of saying 'we can do it better...' you'll spend a long time trying to replicate all of the features in BRMS or a similar utility. How much money will be spent in your time to create what you need? Plus, BRMS or similar will have a lot of error checking built-in that has to be layered into a home-brew application as new and interesting 'conditions' are discovered! Ask me how I know this!!

Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Justin Taylor
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 2:30 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Full save with IASP

FWIW, here are the current specs on the data:

21,873,809 files
85,641 folders
941 GB
Backup takes 20+ hrs on Intel/LTO5