ITC VM/Back-Spool

Backup and Restore Tools

In the past, VM users and developers had to rely on physical tape drives for installing their operating systems onto their VM systems. This was the only way that IBM® delivered their products to their customers. In similar fashion, they would rely on tape to backup and restore all of their important system and end-user files. The IBM Utility SPXTAPE, was the only available application to for backup purposes.

In the last 10 years, IBM employed DVD as the new media delivery for their operating systems. As a result VM shops, particularly newer ones have done away with tape drives. But this left them without an easy spool file backup and recovery solution.

VM/Back-Spool is a versatile application that provides backup and restoration of z/VM® spool files without the need of a physical tape drive. VM/Back-Spool backs up and restores spool files to and from ordinary CMS files, making the requirement for a tape drive unnecessary.

VM/Back-Spool backs up all regular spool files for a given user into one CMS file, making the manipulation of potentially large numbers of spool files easy and straight-forward. Either all or individual spool files can be restored from the CMS backup file as needed.

In addition to normal DCSS backup and restore capabilities, VM/Back-Spool can also backup and restore NSSes, like CMS, GCS, and Linux® kernels. This can make deploying and sharing of new versions of these NSS on different z/VM® systems more straightforward and easier. VM/BackSpool also makes backing up and sharing Linux file systems contained in XIP DCSS simpler.