If there are directories you don’t need to back up, save time and omit them

Is the Integrated File System (IFS) on your System i growing? For many companies, it is. Therefore, backing up the entire IFS can take a lot of time—and it may not be necessary. By omitting directories or objects that do not need to be backed up regularly, you can greatly reduce your backup time.

Prerequisites
To omit IFS directories, you need Robot/SAVE 11.04 and Robot/CORRAL 2.13.

Create an object list of items to omit
First, create a Robot/CORRAL object list containing the IFS objects to be omitted from your backup.

1. Display the Work with Object Lists panel and press function key 6 to add an object list.

2. When the Object List panel displays, enter a name, description, retention type, and choose selection type D (directory). When you press Enter, the Directory Selection criteria displays. Tab to the Directory path field and press function key 4 to select an IFS directory that you want to omit. You can also use file name filters (including generics) to filter objects in the specified directory. If you use a file name filter, Robot/CORRAL will not select subdirectories within the specified directory, which might require you to create multiple object lists. You can use up to 290 omit object lists for each Robot/SAVE backup set.

Tell the backup set to use the lists you created
Next, set up the Robot/SAVE backup set to omit the Robot/CORRAL object list(s).

1. Create a backup set type 9 (Save Entire System) or type 1 (User Defined) to save the IFS.

2. When you get to the Items to Be Saved within a Backup Set panel, press function key 6.

3. When the Item Type Selection panel displays, select IFS Object Lists to Omit.

When the backup runs, Robot/SAVE automatically builds the RBSSAVIFS command with the specified omit-object parameters.

Considerations
* When you set up the Robot/CORRAL omit-object lists, skip the Select Using File Dates section and the Include subdirectories field. If you enter values these fields, Robot/SAVE does not use them (an IBM limitation).

* Robot/SAVE can omit a maximum of 290 directory-type object lists from a backup set or 25,600 formatted bytes in the omit parameter.

* If your directory names or file name filters contain single or double quotation marks, they become case-sensitive and you may need multiple object lists to achieve the desired results.

* If you are familiar with creating object lists of items to save, you may be in the habit of pre-building such lists to save time during your backups. Because Robot/SAVE creates the list of objects to omit on the fly when it executes the RBSSAVIFS command, there is no need to pre-build the list. The best way to test that you are omitting the files you want to omit is to run a save and review the results.

* If you do not specify a file name filter (recommended whenever possible) when you select directories to omit, the resulting Robot/CORRAL object list will omit all subdirectories below the selected directory. For example, if you omit the /notes directory, Robot/CORRAL will omit all objects in /notes including all objects in subdirectories such as /notes/server1/*.

* If you specify a file name filter, only objects in the chosen directory that match the file name pattern will be omitted from the backup. For example, if you specify that files that match the pattern /notes/*.n?f should be omitted, only objects with .NSF and .NTF extensions in the /notes/ directory will be omitted. Because subdirectories do not match this pattern, they will not be included in the omit parameter. You must create another object list to omit them.

Go to Downloads > Help/FACTS to download complete instructions.

Contributed by Jenny Dischinger, Technical Consultant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 9:11 am and is filed under IFS, Robot/SAVE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.