Backup and recovery of auxiliary storage pool devices

This topic describes techniques and strategies for backup and recovery of auxiliary storage pool devices using BRMS. When you add an auxiliary storage pool device to your system configuration, you will need to plan for the backup and recovery of the user data on these devices because these devices operate differently than the system (1) or basic user (2–32) auxiliary storage pools. These differences mean that you have to carefully plan your backup strategy to assure that you have a complete system backup.

Auxiliary disk pool devices are specified in IBM® i operations by the 10-character device description name rather than by specifying an identifying number. BRMS also uses the device name when targeting save or restore operations to auxiliary storage pool devices. Refer to the Disk management topic collection if you are not familiar with auxiliary storage pool device operations or terminology.

To assure a successful recovery of a system which includes auxiliary storage pool devices, you should run BRMS maintenance after each backup. The auxiliary storage pool devices must be available when you run maintenance; otherwise, BRMS will not be able to locate the libraries and will consider the libraries on unavailable auxiliary storage pool devices as having been deleted from the system. By default, deleted libraries are not included in the Recovering Your Entire System Report. You can specify OMITLIB(*NONE) on the STRRCYBRM command to include deleted libraries in the report, but this will also include libraries that were saved and then subsequently deleted which may not be your intention.