Deciding if you want to use shadow copies

You can reduce the time it takes to forward recover a VSAM file by creating a shadow copy of it.

With a shadow copy, you:

If the shadow forward recovery job is run often, the shadow copy of the VSAM sphere is kept up-to-date. If the VSAM sphere is damaged, only a few updates need to be made to the shadow copy to return it to the same state as the original VSAM sphere.

Shadow forward recovery is intended for users who want to maintain a copy of critical data sets to reduce the forward recovery time.

Shadow copies are also useful at remote recovery sites when using products such as Remote Recovery Data Facility (RRDF).

The following topics are discussed in this section: