Edit recovery

Edit recovery helps you to recover data that might otherwise be lost. For example, you would use edit recovery to re-establish the edit session at the point of failure after a power outage or system failure. Turning recovery mode on causes the data to be written to a temporary backup file. This is independent of whether changes have been made to the data.

You can turn on edit recovery mode by performing either of these actions:

Entering the RECOVERY primary command:
```
RECOVERY ON
```
Running an edit macro that contains the RECOVERY macro command:
```
ISREDIT RECOVERY ON
```

If recovery mode is on when a system crash occurs, automatic recovery takes place the next time you attempt to use edit. Recovery mode is remembered in your edit profile.

When you begin an edit session, if there is data to recover, the Edit Recovery panel appears, shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Edit Recovery panel (ISREDM02)

Note: For information about the Data Set Password field, refer to the topic about Libraries and Data Sets in z/OS ISPF User's Guide Vol I.

If you continue with, defer, or cancel recovery and you have other data to be recovered, the Edit Recovery panel is displayed again for the next data set. You can control the number of data sets to be recovered with the edit recovery table, a system data set that contains entries for each level of nested editing sessions that can be recovered. For information on changing edit recovery operands, refer to z/OS ISPF Planning and Customizing.

You may experience B37 (space) abends on the recovery data set if the guidelines in the z/OS ISPF Planning and Customizing have not been followed.

Note: You cannot recursively edit data while you are in an edit session which is the result of an edit recovery.

Attention: If the data set to be recovered was edited by another user before you continue with edit recovery, the changes made by the other user are lost if you save the data.

If you press Enter to continue editing the data set, the editor runs a recovery macro if you had previously specified one by using the RMACRO primary or macro command. See Recovery macros and the descriptions of the RMACRO primary and macro commands for more information.

Despite edit recovery's benefits in recovering data, there are times when you might not want to use it. You might want to turn edit recovery off in these situations:

Operating with recovery mode off eliminates the I/O operations that maintain the recovery data and can therefore result in improved response time.
Besides recording actual data changes, recovery mode records temporary changes, such as excluding lines and defining labels. These temporary changes are recorded to allow UNDO to undo other edit interactions besides those that change data. Therefore, when edit recovery is on, the recording of both data and temporary changes affects the amount of DASD space that is used.

You can turn off edit recovery mode by performing either of these actions:

Entering the RECOVERY primary command:
```
RECOVERY OFF
```
Running an edit macro that contains the RECOVERY macro command:
```
ISREDIT RECOVERY OFF
```

See Edit primary commands for details on using RECOVERY.