Organizing save and restore data on optical devices

Save and restore your data on an optical devices according to path name lengths, naming conventions, and directory levels.

The save data on optical media is uniquely identified by a path name. This path name has the form: /directory name/subdirectory name/../filename. You may create and specify as many directory levels as is necessary to organize your save data to suit your needs. If no directory levels are specified, the save data file is placed in the root directory of the specified optical volume.

The optical path name may be up to 256 alphanumeric characters in length. Optical volume names may be up to 32 alphanumeric characters in length. Some caution is necessary when using long names. Many IBM® i save and restore displays, messages, reports, output files, and object descriptions, support a maximum of 6 characters for volume names, and 17 characters for path names. Longer names will appear truncated in these instances. Additionally, some automated data management software may not properly handle long volume names and long path names.

Saving a library to optical storage

You can save the IBM i library DEVLIB01 to the optical volume SRVOL1 that is contained in library device OPTMLB02. You do this by using the following command:

SAVLIB LIB(DEVLIB01) DEV(OPTMLB02) VOL(SRVOL1) (’/DEVLIB01’)

An optical file containing the save data, with the name DEVLIB01, will be created in the root directory of volume SRVOL1.