It is important that you have sufficient volumes initialized in the scratch pool before performing a save operation. If, during a save operation, you require more volumes than are available in your media scratch pool, a potential exposure can occur. After using your last enrolled volume, i5/OS prompts you to insert the next volume into the media device. If you insert an unenrolled or uninitialized volume, i5/OS issues an inquiry message with an option to initialize that volume. If you do not take this option and instead take C (for cancel) then BRMS cannot complete the save. If you take the initialize option, i5/OS assigns a unique volume ID that is not already in the BRMS media inventory. After the save completes, enroll this volume by using BRMS. Otherwise, BRMS cannot protect the data on this volume, and may overwrite it.
To support the single initialize concept, the file labels belonging to volumes show the date of *PERM. This assures that you cannot write over a volume on any System i® platform without receiving a message. BRMS keeps track of whether the data on the volume has actually expired, and does not overwrite the data with other BRMS save operations.