You can use BRMS to perform a variety of backups. You can, for example, use BRMS-configured defaults to perform a straight forward backup of your entire system. Or you can use a variety of other BRMS tools and techniques to tailor a backup and recovery operation that suits the specific needs of your company. This chapter provides instructions on how to use BRMS-configured defaults to back up all of your system and BRMS data.
Many of the functions described in this chapter are available in the BRMS System i Navigator client. For detailed information about the BRMS System i Navigator client, see the IBM i Information Center.
BRMS generally processes backups by using control groups. You can also use commands to process backups. In this chapter, however, the focus is on performing backups with control groups. Control groups consist of groups of libraries, objects, folders, spooled files, and other types of data that share similar characteristics or that you want grouped together for a particular purpose. BRMS comes with three default backup control groups, *SYSTEM, *SYSGRP and *BKUGRP.
You can use the *SYSTEM control group to backup your entire system in restricted state.
Use the *SYSGRP control group to back up only the IBM® supplied objects of the system in restricted state. The objects include the Licensed Internal code, the i5/OS objects in library QSYS, the security and configuration data, the IBM libraries (primarily the Q libraries), and the IBM directories and files stored in the integrated file system.
Use the *BKUGRP control group to run a non–restricted state backup of all user data. The user data includes the security and configuration data, all user libraries, folders and documents, and user directories and files stored in integrated file system.
This chapter shows you how to use the *SYSGRP, *BKUGRP and *SYSTEM control groups to perform backups of your entire system.
We recommend that you run the *SYSTEM control group as soon as possible after installing BRMS. After the initial backup is complete, you should backup your user and system data as frequently as your business requires. Thus, you might schedule daily backups using the *SYSTEM group. If your backup window is not long enough, you might schedule daily backups of the user data using the *BKUGRP control group, and defer the entire system backups until the end of the week, end of the month, or whenever maintenance is applied to the system. The information contained in this book can assist you in developing and implementing the backup and recovery strategy that best suits your business needs. Tailoring Your Backup and Performing Selected Recoveries provide information about backup and recovery planning and instructions on how to tailor your backup and recovery operations. You will find these chapters particularly helpful when designing your backup and recovery strategy.
Before you can perform any backups, however, you need to enroll the media for BRMS to use. To do that, read the instructions below and enroll your media as applicable.