I haven't used a physical tape at work in a decade or more so I'll leave
that discussion to others. We use VTL or Virtual Tape Library. Not to be
confused to that virtual tape image catalog thing (which I've used a little
in the past).
What I have done is bare metal restores to new systems as part of a system
migration. From these virtual tape libraries. Works great. Definitely
pleases the auditors. In doing work for others I have discovered backup
plans in which I have little to no faith that the backup could perform a
bare metal restore.
Thing I like about BRMS is the ability to spot check. For example, an IFS
directory was created within a week or so after our last quarterly full
system save. This directory was created, populated and remained stagnant.
The incremental backups found it and saved it. However the scenario was
that the retention on the incremental backups was only 14 days. It's been
well over 14 days since that was saved. I did a WRKLNKBRM to find what
tapes that directory was on. It wasn't on any. Luckily I had started to
wonder about that particular scenario and it really didn't need to be
restored. And the spot check discovered the error. This is the kind of
stuff the auditors are wanting to catch. I will do an out of cycle full
system save and increase the incremental retention to exceed the time
between quarterly saves.
Participating in this discussion just gave me a thought...
You know you have the following services, right?
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=services-object-statistics-table-function
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=services-ifs-object-statistics-table-function
And, when you save, you can have the details of the save go to an output
file right? Like
SAVLIB LIB(ROB)
DEV(*SAVF)
SAVF(QTEMP/MYSAVF)
OUTPUT(*OUTFILE)
OUTFILE(QTEMP/SAVLIST)
OUTMBR(*FIRST *REPLACE)
INFTYPE(*OBJ)
right?
And you can do something like this, too, right?
SAV DEV('/qsys.lib/qtemp.lib/mysavf.file')
OBJ(('/home/rob/*'))
OUTPUT('/home/ROB/ifssave.txt')
Well if you can create a list of every object on your system and bounce it
against these you should have a list of everything of when it was last
saved. Look at the output. LOTS of detail in there. The ifs list looks a
little wonky at first but I've got other work to do. Besides, I'd get this
information from the BRMS output files instead. I'm sure you could figure
out a good exception report starting from this.
This won't tell you the SAVSYS stuff, etc but most auditors can be drowned
in diarrhea and be satisfied.
On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 3:55 PM Jerry Draper <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Auditors want proof that the backups indeed did a backup.
Strategy?
Perhaps read jog log for confirmation of each step?
SAVSECDTA
SAVCFTG
SAVLIB *ALLUSR
SAVDLO
SAV <IFS>
TIA,
Jerry
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