Home > BRM Tip – Application Point-in-Time Backups Made Easy

BRM Tip – Application Point-in-Time Backups Made Easy

- Application data backups at specific cycle points! -

The Backup and Recovery Manager (BRM) Suite has a number of useful functions that can be used to perform application-centric backups for specific cycle points in time. These functions can be used to identify application critical data sets based on application activity, track application backups created before, during or after the application cycle and inventory this information to support application recovery.

The Automatic Selection and Audit Processing (ASAP) function provides real-time monitoring of application jobs and records application data set usage to construct a comprehensive list of critical data sets. At the desired application cycle point, ASAP examines the data set usage records to build the critical data set list. This list then can be automatically tailored, using filters, to include or exclude specific data sets and can be constructed in formats compatible with various backup utilities such as DFSMShsm ABARS, DFSMSdss and FDR.

The ABARS Manager (ABM) function provides enhanced usage and exploitation of DFSMShsm ABARS backup and recovery features. The application point-in-time critical data set list constructed by ASAP can be used, and potentially customized by ABM, to invoke native ABARS to perform application data backup from online DASD, migration or user tape. ABM then records the ABARS backup results to support local or remote data set backup searches and recoveries.

The All/Star (AST) function provides backup tracking and recovery support for backups created by utilities other than ABARS. AST will track and record registered backup job information without any backup job JCL changes, support searching for specific data set backups and automatically build the necessary restore jobs. In addition, AST can perform application cycle point backup validation and recovery. The critical data set list produced by ASAP is used to inspect the AST recorded backup inventory, verify all data sets have backups, identify missing backups and optionally identify non-current backups.

For additional information contact Ron Ratcliffe at ronr@mainstar.com (617) 614-4543.