As a system administrator, one of your main responsibilities is to manage the backup and recovery plan for your System i.

Are you backing up your system correctly? In the event of a failure, can you recover from your backup tapes?

IBM provides a Backup Scheduler in i/OS that you can use to set up daily, weekly, and monthly backup routines. While there are some great third-party products that provide many more features and functions, this built-in scheduler does provides a list of the last backup dates of your libraries and folders. To access this information, you can use the CL command GO SETUPBCKUP and then select option 10 from that menu to change the library backup list. We are not using the option to actually change the library backup list, but instead to review the resulting display.

Each library is listed with the corresponding last backup date and information on whether anything inside the library has changed since the last backup. If the library has never been backed up on this system, the date is blank.

                         Change Library Backup List                           
                                                     System: MYSYSTEM  
 Find library  . . . . . . __________     Starting characters _____                  
 Type options below, then press Enter.                                          
   2=Change backup   5=Display library contents   8=Display details             
                  -----------Backup-----------  Last                            
 Opt  Library     Daily     Weekly    Monthly   Backup    Changed               
      $TEMP       Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      @@$PTABPTF  Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      ALLBEST00   Yes       Yes       Yes       06/01/08  Yes                   
      DETECTOR    Yes       Yes       Yes       07/17/08  Yes                   
      CARMTTST    Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      CASH        Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      CCC         Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      CCTH        Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      DONW        Yes       Yes       Yes                 Yes                   
      DSYSTEM     Yes       Yes       Yes       08/22/08  No                    
      FLASH       Yes       Yes       Yes       08/22/08  No                    
                                                                        More... 
 F1=Help   F3=Exit   F5=Refresh   F11=Display descriptions   F12=Cancel         
 F14=Select other libraries       F15=Change all                         

You can also review the backup status of your folder system using option 11 (change folder backup list) from the SETUPBCKUP menu.

There is also a related display command named DSPBCKUPL that you can run from the command line or include in a CL program.

               Display Backup List (DSPBCKUPL)

Type choices, press Enter.

Backup list  . . . . . . . . . .   *LIB          *LIB, *FLR
Output . . . . . . . . . . . . .   *_____        *, *PRINT

The best part of this command is that, in addition to displaying the list, you can also use it to print the backup list report for your records.

Remember that to access the controlling functions for the QDLS folders, you must be enrolled in the system directory (WRKDIRE).