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.