Joined: 14 Mar 2007 Posts: 8797 Location: Welsh Wales
DFdss incremental backup does exactly what it says on the tin
You can select datasets by dataset mask, and also select only those that have not been previously backed up, so guess that would only leave new creations.
Please, please don't tell me that you were considering backing up each dataset to one label, please, just don't.
Have you investigated your storage management people, really great people , to see if the DASD management software can do this, products like DFhsm use around 95% of any tapes automatically stacking datasets and also keeps track of exactly where they are. DFhsm can also create duplex copies too, as can DFdss
Had you have described the requirement accurately at the START of this thread maybe a much better solution would have been found much faster
Joined: 30 Nov 2013 Posts: 917 Location: The Universe
harisukumaran wrote:
I was told that automated backups would require the dataset names to follow a pattern. Datasetsl names in my list do not have any naming pattern and so I need to develop this custom process.
I think you'll find there is a pattern, if you look carefully. As expat says, ADRDSSU's data set matching capability is very flexible. The only advantage of your idea is recovery of the backed up data sets should be much easier than using ADRDSSU.
harisukumaran wrote:
Also, my tape management person tells me that tapes backed up for extended periods of time need to be stacked with datasets.
At one level I agree with your tape management person. Stacking is not as fast - even if done properly, which your BPXWDYN idea is not doing, as documented before, as you think. I recall - this was in 1989 or 1990 - watching an old style drive with round tapes. It would write normally for a few seconds, then stop, the drive seemed to backup the tape, read something, write something, then write normally for a second or two, and so on. It turned out it was DFHSM stacking migrated data sets to the tape. This pause between files was MVS data management starting a new file.
Curious why would you want to backup GDG's which are effectively a backup anyway?
One easy way would be to use DFDSS DUMP that just takes all the datasets into a single backup dataset. (The only issue with this would be that it won't backup datasets that have been migrated/archived by DFHSM or similar.)
You can specify dataset name masks that would capture a lot of GDG names with a single line, and you can specify the relative generation numbers you want to capture. So specifying NAME(0) would only backup the latest generations. You can also refine the selection further if you want to using the BY selection criteria as well to check on things like creation date, last reference date and change flags.
Depending on your TAPE subsystem you may or may not want to code the COMPRESS parameter in the SYSIN or a DATACLAS in the JCL that provides ZEDC compression. Some TAPE subsystems such as DLM do their own compression so no point in coding COMPRESS.