BACKUP OFTEN

I said a lot earlier in the general Q and A pages about the reliability of disk storage subsystems. This especially applies to the subsystems using RAID technologies to provide single point of failure avoidance.

You Still HAVE to BACKUP your data. Even if the disk devices don't fail, you or one of your collegues could have inadvertantly caused data to be overwritten or deleted or otherwise corrupted.

And besides, just like Captain Smith told Mrs. Brown, "Don't Worry!" (Actually, he said "Not even God can sink this ship!" In the recent Titanic movie, this line was said by the ship's chief designer, rather than by Captain Smith.

You don't need to reorganize often

Just because you backup the file, you need not restore it! Of course, you should ensure that the backup and restore procedures really work, but generally reorganization does not speed direct processing (the type that is usually done by on-line transactions). Think about how much batch window time is spent doing reorganizations, when simpler and quicker backups would be enough.

BACKUP Command hints

Remember BLOCK BIG? Well, here's another opportunity. If you have any sort of modern tape drive, specify BLOCKSIZE(65535) and BUFFERS(8) on your BACKUP command. Ideally, you would have also specified a Data CI size in keeping with my batch suggestions. for sequential processing, too, so that the BACKUP command can read multiple tracks worth of data without missing disk revolutions. Missing disk revolutions are the principal cause of long-running BACKUPs.