Dumping Data from Disk to Tape

If you need to dump all or part of the data on DASD to a tape, use the DASD dump restore utility that IBM® provides with z/VM. For more information, see Running the DASD Dump Restore Utility (DDRXA).

If you want to dump one or more CMS files to tape, use the CMS TAPE DUMP command, or the vmfplc2 command.

For example, if you want to dump to tape all of the files on your A disk with a file type of ACCOUNT, and:
  • You want CMS to write a tape mark after each file
  • You want a printout of the names of the files that were dumped
  • The tape drive dedicated to your virtual machine is assigned virtual device number 184. Enter:
tape dump * account a (wtm print tap4
The asterisk indicates that you want to dump all of the files on your A disk with the file type of ACCOUNT. If you want to dump only a specific file, specify the file's name instead of the asterisk.
Note: The records in these CMS files can be of either fixed or variable length. However, none of the files can be larger than one DASD volume.