🚀 go-pugleaf

Before I  post my question,  I must say  that I am  not the person  here who
installs our IBM software.  I am a user consultant, not a systems analyst.
 
We here at Temple University are setting up VMarchive for general use.  In a
meeting today about VMArchive, one  outstanding issue came up which concerns
me a great deal.
 
We will have our VMArchive recalls scheduled every hour and archives every 2
hours.  In  any event,  we are setting  up a series  of five  107Meg staging
areas abd we gave sixteen 3480 tape  drives.  This should handle quiet a lot
of user  archiving activity.   I am  concerned about  the DASD  area catalog
which contains the information about the  archived files both in the staging
area  and on  tape.  After  a lot  of archiving  activity, exactly  how much
trouble will we be in if this catalog file become corrupt or destroyed?
 
The archived  files will  be fine (in  this scenerio), but  we won't  have a
record  of what's  there.  We  definitely need  a backup  procedure for  the
master VMArchive catalog  file.  My boss suggested that it  would be okay to
do one backup  of this file at the  end of each day.  That  idea doesn't sit
well with me.  What I want to know  is if there is anyway of backing up this
single file  perhaps hourly to another  disk file just in  case the original
goes bad.  This  way, all we'l lose is an  hour's archiving activity.  Could
we just schedule a vmschedule job to  kick in every hour and do this backup.
I was told this wouldn't work, but it seems like a good idea to me.
 
This can't be a  unique problem.  I am sure our DASD devises  are no more or
less reliable than the norm.  How do other people handle this problem?  I do
not want my department caught with our pants down if some big wig gets angry
because  they can't  get  back  an archived  file  because  our catalog  got
corrupted even  though the actual  file may be  fine.  Any thoughts  on this
matter?  Thanks much!