Because the environment at the remote site might differ from your environment, you should ensure that your disaster recovery backups can be restored in a different environment. In general, it is recommended that you use the logical data set DUMP command and filter on the data set name to make disaster recovery backups. Logical data set dump processing allows you to back up only your critical data sets and to restore to unlike devices.

Making logical data set dumps for disaster recovery backup requires a naming convention or some other method to identify your critical data sets. If, for example, you establish the convention of having the letters CRIT as the first four characters in the first qualifier of critical data sets, you can back them up for disaster recovery as follows:

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

If for some reason you must do volume dumps for disaster recovery, you should do logical volume dumps instead of physical volume dumps. That way, you can restore the backups to unlike devices. You can perform logical volume dumps by using DATASET (INCLUDE(**)) and either the LOGINDDNAME or LOGINDYNAM keyword with the DUMP command.