Planning an availability strategy

In planning your overall availability strategy, you should consider the following types of backup:

Backup of volumes and data sets—The general type of backup to guard against users accidentally losing or incorrectly changing their data sets and against losing volumes because of hardware failures.
Disaster recovery backup—Backup to protect against the loss of all your data in a major disaster at your site. These backups are stored off site and, in the event of a major disaster, are recovered at another site.
Vital records backup—Backup copies of data sets kept to meet externally imposed retention requirements, such as tax records.
Archival—Backup of data that is unused for a long period of time. You remove the data from DASD and retain it on tape in case it is needed again.

DFSMSdss is a flexible backup and recovery tool. You can use DFSMSdss by itself to perform all backups listed above or to complement other backup and recovery tools.