Testing your strategy

 

If your situation requires a medium save strategy or a complex save strategy, it requires regular review.

The regular review is as follows:

• Are you saving everything occasionally?

• What do you need to do to recover to the known point (4) on the backup and recovery timeline?

• Are you using options like journaling or saving changed objects to help you recover to the failure point (5)? Do you know how to recover using those options?

• Have you added new applications? Are the new libraries, folders, and directories being saved?

• Are you saving the IBM-supplied libraries that contain user data (for example, QGPL and QUSRSYS)?

  The Special values for the SAVLIB command topic lists all of the IBM-supplied libraries that contain user data.

• Have you tested your recovery?

The best way to test your strategy for saving is to test a recovery. Although you can test a recovery on your own system, it is very risky. If you do not save everything successfully, you might lose information when you attempt to restore.

A number of organizations offer recovery testing as a service. Business continuity and resiliency is one organization that helps you with the recovery testing.

 

Parent topic:

Planning a backup and recovery strategy

Related concepts
Backup and recovery timeline