ICF catalogs are essential system data sets. Even with the high availability storage subsystems and processors that are available today, there are still situations where you need to recover your catalogs. You should keep your catalogs healthy and be prepared for a recovery situation. Also, you must be sure that your recovery procedures do not have a big impact on your production environment. To minimize the recovery process, you should have a clear backup and recovery strategy and the proper utilities.

IBM Integrated Catalog Forward Recovery Utility (ICFRU) and Mainstar Catalog RecoveryPlus are two of the available tools you can use to recover your catalogs. ICFRU is a basic tool to help you in a forward recovery situation. It does not offer a wide range of features, but it is useful for catalog recovery. Mainstar Catalog RecoveryPlus offers a set of features to help you with your ICF catalog environment maintenance.

This IBM Redpaper explains how to use each of these products in a catalog recovery situation. It also offers storage administrators with useful recommendations for implementing a catalog backup and recovery plan. It does not compare the two products but instead shows how each of them work. This paper also provides practical tests and examples that can help you with the different error scenarios that you might find in your daily production activities.

Chapter 1. Using Integrated Catalog Forward Recover Utility

Chapter 2. Using Catalog RecoveryPlus

Chapter 3. Case studies