🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm looking for suggestions on the following problem:

We'd like to allow users to do application "backups".  I use the term
"backups" loosely so as not to prejudiced towards/against either
VMARCH/VMBACKUP.

At various points in the day/week/month users do mass update of their
database. They would like to freeze the data at a point in time so that
they have known point of recovery if things get all hosed up.

A user exec needs to initiate a "backup" sequence wait for its completion
syncronously, and then continue with the database load/refresh/whatever.

Things we've considered:

1) VMTAPE and MOVEFILE, TAPE DUMP, etc.
 	+ no special priveleges required by end users

     	- no catalog, not very friendly, not easily queryable

2) VMARCH - we have some staging and of course offline, no "DASD"

     	+ users are familiar with VMARCH

     	+ we know how to query for jobs enqueded and hold the submitting
exec until complete.

     	- haven't thought of good way to initiate the processing of OFFLINE
requests immediately (files are typically large-ish to large).

3) VMBACKUP

     	+ we know how to query for jobs enqueded and hold the submitting
exec until complete.
     	- template administration

     	- no granularity in ADMIN commands to create template, execute A
SPECIFIC job.

     	- concerns on how to initate the processing of backup job

4) Seperate SVM for either VMARCH or VMBACKUP where operator/admin
functions could be given to users without endangering the SYSTEM wide ones.

      -+ Have only just begun looking at this.

Any ideas/pointers would be appreciated.

-- Joe

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