IBM i backup strategies may use journaling to shorten or eliminate down time for applications during backups. BRMS provides special control group entries which assist in backing up journal receivers for these backup strategies.
*ALLCHGRCV can be specified as a control group entry to save journal receivers that have not been saved since they were last changed. This entry will include journal receivers that are attached to a journal and journal receivers that are not attached to a journal.
*ALLDTCRCV can be specified as a control group entry to save journal receivers that have not been saved since they were detached. This entry will only include journal receivers that are not attached to a journal.
By default, for either of these control group entries, all journal receivers associated with all journals will be processed except journal receivers associated with journals that are in libraries that start with ‘Q’.
It may be useful to limit the journal receivers to a specific set of journals. To do this, object list QCHGJRNRCV can be created for *ALLCHGRCV backups and/or object list QDTCJRNRCV can be created for *ALLDTCRCV backups. Only journal receivers associated with journals that are specified in the respective object lists will be processed. Using QCHGJRNRCV or QDTCJRNRCV differs from the default behavior in an important way: If the object list contains a journal in a library that starts with a ‘Q’, the journal receivers for that journal will be processed. For example, journal QSYS/QAUDJRN can be added to QCHGJRNRCV or QDTCJRNRCV to save the audit journal receivers.
In releases IBM i 7.2 and later, exclude entries can also be specified in object list QCHGJRNRCV or QDTCJRNRCV to exclude journals from *ALLCHGRCV and *ALLDTCRCV backups.
See BRMS Wiki page Using ALLCHGRCV or ALLDTCRCV control group entries to save journal receivers for more information.
I’d like to thank MJ Thompson for writing this week’s blog. MJ is part of the BRMS development team at IBM in Rochester, MN. Thanks MJ!
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on April 15, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.