When do you want your dumps performed?

If you already use automatic dump, then a time of day and dump cycle is already in place. If not, then typically the time and day of the week is when the system is not very busy. The daily dump cycle consists of a repeating pattern of up to 31 days where dumps are made or not made. Most DFSMShsm administrators use a weekly or daily dump cycle. You can choose any days where dumps are made to have your volumes dumped; however, some dump days might be busier than others, limiting tape hardware availability on those days. You can also specify how frequently you perform dumps by the minimum number of days that must pass from one dump to the next. If you do not already have automatic dump set up, then tape hardware availability and DASD write activity are the only factors limiting when you can dump your Linux volumes. You can also perform a manual dump of your volumes for special situations.

When scheduling your dumps, you must ensure that no writes to the volumes that you are dumping occur while the dumps are being made. The best way to ensure the data integrity of your partitions and their dumps is to unmount them or to have them mounted as read-only. By unmounting a partition, you flush all buffered data that has not yet been written to the partition.