To rephrase an old saying, there are two types of people in this world: those who back up their computers regularly, and idiots. I, apparently, am an idiot. Just three weeks ago, my home PC had a hard drive failure. Though I did back up my wife's laptop fairly regularly (I'm not that stupid), my PC stood as a beacon of inertia, a tower of laziness, a badge of, well, stupidity.

It's not as if I didn't have the means. I have a DVD burner. I even have backup software. It was the mere effort of sitting there while the backup software burned eight DVDs, or the effort of actually walking into Best Buy to purchase an $89 external hard drive, which would have provided an easier solution.

Anyway, having just sown my badge of stupidity on my shirt (looks very nice next to my crest of inefficiency), I thought it would be a great time to talk about how iSeries Navigator can help you easily perform regular backups and restores of your data.

Backup Built into Your System i

Built into iSeries Navigator is a basic backup policy management UI. It lets you set basic parameters to describe the backup. Here is a quick summary.

General. You can customize three policies: Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. This means that you can specify different amounts of data and other details for each of these policies. In each policy, the General tab lets you specify whether or not to schedule the backup now. It also lets you decide whether to notify the operator, and if so, how many hours before the backup is scheduled to begin.

What. This tab lets you define the data to be backed up. You can choose which libraries, folders, directories, and user data to back up. You can also select to back up all of the data or browse for certain sets. The What tab also lets you decide to fully back up the selected data or back up only changed data.

When. This tab lets you schedule when you want the backup to occur. The Schedule tab is the same for all policies, so you edit the schedule only once, and each policy will use it.

Where. This tab lets you specify which backup device to use for which policy, as well as how to handle the tapes (e.g., rotating, erasing). From here, you can also specify a virtual tape device (if you aren't familiar with this, look it up at the Information Center — it's really cool).

Use Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS)

For most users, however, you will probably need more flexibility in your backup and recovery strategy. In these cases, consider using BRMS. It provides a much richer environment to manage backing up your system, restoring data, and recovering lost data, as well as managing media on tape libraries and such.

Once you've purchased BRMS and installed it on your System i, you can open iSeries Navigator to install the plug-in. Do this by selecting File|Install Options|Install Plugins. Choose the system where you've installed BRMS (Figure 1), and then follow the wizard.

Now that you have BRMS installed, Figure 2 shows the initial layout and what you can do. BRMS provides several areas to focus on at various times in your backup strategy.

Taskpad

When selecting the Backup, Recovery and Media Services folder, you'll see not only the tree of folders (described below), but also the list of the most important backup tasks in the taskpad. For example, if you do nothing else in your life, select "Back up the system." This option will back up the entire system for you (and protect you from being an idiot like me). Figure 3 shows how simple it is to do a full backup. The Run Backup Policy display defaults to the *System backup policy, which backs up the entire system.

Backup Policies

Once you move beyond the need to do more than full system backups, you can start creating your own policies. The Backup Policies display lists additional policies shipped with BRMS, or you can customize all kinds of details by creating a new policy. All of the details are then listed in the Backup Policies view.

From this view, you can perform tasks such as the following:

• New Policy: The New Backup Policy wizard lets you create a customized policy specifying the data to be backed up and when.
• Manage Lists: This task lets you create lists of folders, directories, objects, and printer output to help simplify your backup policy. For example, if certain folders and printer output logically belong to the same application, it may make sense to back them up at the same frequency.
• View History: This task lets you select a customized view, which you can use to create a historical look at all the backup activity performed on your system. It will show all of the objects that were saved and when.
• View Backup Policies Report: This task lets you view or save reports on several items, including information about your backup policies, archive policies, move policies, and BRMS log (messages including help text), as well as information about your volumes.

Archive Policies

After you've backed up a lot of your data, you may decide that you want to archive some it. This means that the data is no longer physically on your system; only a pointer to your data remains on the system, and the actual data resides on your backup media. To learn how this can be a powerful tool, go to the Information Center. But for now, just know that since you have a pointer to the data's location, BRMS can help you archive data that is rarely accessed, then provide the means to restore the data if it is requested in the future.

Just like the Backup Policies, the Archive Policies folder has similar actions, including

• New Policy
• Manage Lists
• View History
• View Archive Policies Report

Move Policies

For sensitive data that needs to be protected, you'll need to physically move the media it's stored on away from the system, and potentially from one remote location to another. For example, your payroll data for the current pay period needs to be on your system. After you back it up, the media probably shouldn't be right next to the system, in case of a natural disaster.

However, the recent data should be fairly close by so that it can be accessed quickly. As the data gets older, you still need it available, but it can be at a distant location. That's what these policies help you do — maintain a regular schedule to rotate the location of your media so the data is always safe. Figure 4 shows the properties view of a Payroll move policy that lists the locations where the data will reside and for how long. Additional actions on the Move Policies folder include

• New Policy
• Run All Move Policies
• Verify Moves
• Manage Locations
• Manage Containers
• View Move Policies Report

Media Management

Finally, when you have lots and lots of tapes or DVDs of data that must be quickly accessible, you can use a tape library or other devices. Even if you want to stick with simpler devices, the Media Management folder lets you manage all the volumes. No more will you wonder, "Where did last month's tape go?" Figure 5 displays a view of the volumes involved in your backup strategy.

Additional actions on the On the Media folder or the Tape Volumes folder are

• View History
• Manage Devices
• Reclaim
• Add
• View Volumes Report

Remember that there are also several actions you can take on the media and media groups themselves to help manage them.

Scheduling

Scheduling is one of the most important task in a backup strategy. BRMS provides scheduling when you decide to run any of the policies (backup, archive, move). It does this by integrating into the Management Central function of iSeries Navigator. In general, Management Central is where you can schedule tasks to run across multiple systems. With BRMS integrating its scheduling function into Management Central, you'll be able to manage all of your scheduled iSeries Navigator tasks from one place. (The default scheduler in Management Central is decent but fairly basic. If you need more advanced scheduling, check out the Advanced Job Scheduler at the Information Center.)

When you select to schedule a backup, for example, you right-click a backup policy to display the Run Now action, then choose the Schedule task. Just so you are prepared, you won't see the usual Management Central "Schedule" dialog right away. As Figure 6 shows, once you click Schedule, you'll see the confirmation of what will be backed up. Next, you'll be asked how you want to save the output of the backup, and finally you'll see the schedule dialog. After you click OK on the schedule dialog, the scheduled task will appear in Management Central's Scheduled Tasks|Backup, Recovery and Media Services folder.

Additional Features

All of the views come with a variety of ways to sort, filter, and manage the columns in a view. One example is the Tape Volumes view. The default is to have six columns, but by selecting Customize this view|Columns, you can add up to 20 columns. You can see a sample of the rich data available in the columns in Figure 7.

A Taste of the Offerings

This is just a taste of what iSeries Navigator and BRMS offer you for backing up your system. I plan to cover even more of what BRMS does in future articles. For more information, check out the Information Center (ibm.com/eserver/iseries/infocenter), which has lots of good information about BRMS and planning your backup strategy.

Greg Hintermeister works at IBM as a user interaction designer and is an IBM master inventor. He has extensive experience designing user interaction for iSeries Navigator, IBM's Virtualization products, wireless applications, and numerous web applications, and numerous web applications. Greg is a regular speaker at user groups and technical conferences. You can e-mail him at gregh@us.ibm.com.

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