Deciding how often to make backups

Set up a backup strategy for your VSAM spheres.

Making daily backups of your VSAM spheres

If you make daily backups of your VSAM spheres, then if one of them is damaged, CICS® VR can easily recreate it using the backup. Since the backup is recent, CICS VR only needs to apply the changes that were made that day to bring the VSAM sphere back to the exact state before the data was lost. You can speed up forward recovery processing even more by using CICS VR change accumulation. See Setting up CICS VR change accumulation for more information on change accumulation.

Making nondaily backups of your VSAM spheres

If you do not make daily backups of your VSAM spheres, CICS VR can still easily recreate it using the backup. CICS VR needs to apply more changes, perhaps several days' worth of transactions, to bring the VSAM sphere back to the exact state before the data was lost. You can significantly speed up forward recovery processing for nondaily backups by using CICS VR change accumulation. See Setting up CICS VR change accumulation for more information on change accumulation.