Vital records are maintained to meet external retention requirements (such as legal requirements).

Like disaster recovery backups, vital records are kept at a remote site and therefore should reside on tape. Vital records are usually an even smaller percentage of all data than disaster recovery backups. Unlike disaster recovery backups, vital records are rarely necessary for normal processing.

Vital records are usually kept for long periods of time. The device they originally resided on may no longer be in use at the time of recovery, and you may need to restore them to unlike devices. Therefore, vital records should be dumped logically so they can be restored to unlike devices. As with disaster recovery, using logical data set DUMP processing requires a naming convention or some other method to identify data sets for dumping.

If, for example, you establish the convention of having the letters VR as the first two characters in the first qualifier of data sets to be backed up for vital records purposes, you can dump them as follows:

DUMP  -
    DATASET(INCLUDE(VR*.**) -
            BY(MGMTCLAS,EQ,MCNAME))  -
    OUTDDNAME(TAPE)  -
    COMPRESS