Deciding when to make additional backups

Even if you make regular backups, you might need to make an additional backup of your VSAM spheres. Here are several examples of when to make a new backup of your VSAM sphere:

• If you change the physical characteristics of a VSAM sphere, such as the control interval (CI) size, or the length or location of a key field.
• If you successfully recover your VSAM sphere.
• If you are using CICS® VR forward recovery logging for batch updates and your batch job receives a 3999 condition code.