Backing up and restoring the Printer Inventory

It is extremely important that you back up the Printer Inventory regularly. You should also back up the Printer Inventory after creating or modifying definitions (such as, printer definitions) in the Printer Inventory.

When you restore the Printer Inventory, no print jobs are lost. However, information in the Printer Inventory about current print jobs is lost. This means that users, including SAP R/3 users, are not notified when jobs submitted through Print Interface complete, users cannot query the status of the jobs, and operators cannot see information about the print jobs in Infoprint Central.

You can use the Infoprint Server Printer Inventory Definition Utility pidu export command to back up and restore the Printer Inventory. The next sections summarize the steps to back up (and restore) the Printer Inventory to one of these types of files:

• A file in a Hierarchical File System (HFS) or a z/OS File System (zFS)
• A data set in a generation data group (GDG)

Rule: Do not use copy commands to create a backup copy of the Printer Inventory because the copy might contain inconsistent data that makes the Printer Inventory unusable.