Backing up and restoring the Printer Inventory

It is important that you back up the Printer Inventory regularly. You also need to back up the Printer Inventory after you create or modify 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)

Start of change When you try to start Infoprint Server with z/OS V2R2, and dynamic configuration is enabled, you see message AOP192E if Infoprint Server cannot find a valid system configuration definition in the Printer Inventory. You can use the loadprinterinventory command to restore the Printer Inventory with a valid system configuration definition. End of change

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.