Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Restoring TSM Without A Volhist

Someone in the comments to an old post just asked for directions/instructions on restoring TSM without a volume history or devconfig file. Well, I got some bad news and some not so bad but not fun news. We will start with the not so bad news. If you don't have a devconfig, don't panic! You can recreate the devconfig. That's fairly simple, just a pain. TSM has to have a devconfig file to initialize its devices so if the devconfig is not present you'll have to create one. Typically you do this when you rebuild a TSM instance. For example at a DR site you install TSM on the DR server, define the dsmserv.opt, and then you define base devices on the new install. Once that has been done you can bring down TSM and attempt a restore using the newly defined device(s). 

Now for the bad news. Without the volhist, if you don't know what volume(s) were used for DBBAckup your kind of screwed. The old DSMSERV DISPLAY DBBACKUPVOLUME command has been removed/deleted and IBM now says the following

DSMSERV DISPLAY DBBACKUPVOLUME - Information about volumes used for database backup is available from the volume history file. The volume history file is now required to restore the database. 

You can find a list of TSM Server deleted commands, utilities, and options at the following link.


1 comment:

  1. I find this a slightly incorrect.
    Yes, in the time of the TSM 5.x there was the mentioned "DSMSERV DISPLAY DBBACKUPVOLUME" command to scan the tapes/files. For the actual restore you could use "volumenames" parameter to supply the list of volumes with the DB backup (still talking about pre-5.x versions). With this you were able to restore the DB without the volume history file.
    TSM 6.1 changed that with the DB2 - the volume history file contained not only the DB backup volume name but also other information - example can be found here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21503259
    So without this data you were unable to restore the database - as you cannot "figure these out" (as stated in the link - if you have recovery plan file, it contains the volume history part).
    TSM 6.3 and above (not sure if higher 6.1 or 6.2 fixpacks levels) changed that back (kind of) and removed this add-on info from the file. You still need the volume history file to run the DB restore (cannot supply the volume list to the command itself) but if you know the volume names with the DB backup (from the email reports, file locations, timestamps, crystal orb ...) you can recreate the volume history file by hand.
    Not anything you want to do on the daily basis but not impossible.

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