Offloading work and backing up the system

All input jobs and system output are stored on spool. JES2 supports offloading data from and later reloading data to the spool, which is useful for the following tasks:

Preserving jobs and SYSOUT across a cold start, which entails the total rebuilding of work and output queues.
Migrating your installation to another release of JES2. (You can use spool offload to reload the spool to the new or previous release.)
Converting to another DASD type for spool.
Archiving system jobs and SYSOUT.
Relieving a full-spool condition during high-use periods. (You can reload at a later time.)
Providing a backup for spool data sets.
Backing up network connections.

Many selection criteria can be used to limit the scope of the spool offload operation. For example, work can be selected based on the system the job will run on, job number, job disposition (for example, only held data sets), destination, class, or many other criteria. These selection criteria can be changed by operator command following your initial specification with JES2 initialization statements.