After the completion of each save, BRMS can generate a series of up-to-date reports that guide you, in a step-by-step manner, through the process of recovering your entire system. You can also use these reports to guide you through the recovery of selected aspects of your system. In the case of total system failure, the reports guide you through the first manual steps of the recovery process. These initial, manual steps include recovery of the Licensed Internal Code and the operating system. After completing the manual steps, you can use BRMS and these reports to help you restore the rest of your system.
While this chapter provides information about how to recover your entire system, there are a variety of other ways by which to recover data. For example, you can restore information by control group, object, library, and document library objects (DLOs). You can find information about how to perform selected recoveries in Performing Selected Recoveries.
Because the success of your recovery depends in large part on the kind and quality of your backup operation, you should design your backup plan carefully. Tailoring Your Backup and Online Lotus Server Backups, provide more information about how to plan and implement an effective, viable backup strategy for your system.
Key to good system recovery is running BRMS maintenance regularly. You should run maintenance after each backup to assure BRMS detects and records new and deleted libraries. By default, deleted libraries are not included in the Recovering Your Entire System Report. This is important if you are saving libraries on auxiliary storage pool devices. 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. 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.
Many of the functions described in this chapter are available using the BRMS System i Navigator client. For detailed information about the BRMS System i Navigator client see the IBM i Information Center.