DFSMSdss availability management consists of backing up data on DASD to tape and restoring from the backup if the original is lost, damaged, or inadvertently changed.

For data set backup, you can perform incremental backups to help reduce processing time while still meeting your backup requirements. Incremental backup means that data sets are backed up only if they have changed since their last backup.

Volume backups are used to protect against media failure. You can use volume backups in conjunction with incremental data set backups to recover a volume. As a result, you need not do volume backups as frequently. Incremental data set backups should be done daily and volume backups weekly. If a volume is lost for some reason, you can restore from the most recent volume backup and apply incremental data set backups to the volume to bring it back to its most current status.