Backup, recovery, and restart

 

WebSphere MQ for iSeries uses the OS/400 journaling support to help its backup and restore strategy. You must be familiar with standard OS/400 backup and recovery methods, and with the use of journals and their associated journal receivers on OS/400, before reading this section. For information on these topics, see OS/400 Backup and Recovery.

To understand the backup and recovery strategy, you first need to understand how WebSphere MQ for iSeries organizes its data in the i5/OS file system and the integrated file system (IFS)

WebSphere MQ for iSeries holds its data in an individual library for each queue manager, and in stream files in the IFS file system.

The queue manager specific libraries contain journals, journal receivers, and objects required to control the work management of the queue manager. The IFS directories and files contain WebSphere MQ configuration files, the descriptions of WebSphere MQ objects, and the data they contain.

Every change to these objects, that is recoverable across a system failure, is recorded in a journal before it is applied to the appropriate object. This has the effect that such changes can be recovered by replaying the information recorded in the journal.