CICS/Forward Recovery System

When a VSAM file is corrupted or lost you need to recover it quickly and correctly. CICS' journal facility provides the data, but it is each installation's responsibility to have computer disaster recovery plans with recovery programs for each file which CICS updates. Most installations have not done this. MacKinney Systems Forward Recovery System for CICS (CICS/FRS) fills this void.

Dynamic Transaction Backout does not keep your files from being corrupted by program error, software problems, disk drive failure, or power supply problems. It only helps if a transaction abends. To ensure that the work done through CICS is not lost, you need CICS/Forward Recovery System.

CICS/Forward Recovery System runs as a batch job OUTSIDE of your CICS system. NO MODIFICATIONS are required to CICS or CICS programs.

CICS/Forward Recovery System uses a procedure requiring a minimum of JCL to ease the effort involved in recovering a production KSDS, RRDS, or ESDS VSAM dataset.

Input to the procedure is a set of simple control records (commands) that identify the file involved, the transaction(s) involved, the beginning and ending time(s) and date(s), and the terminal(s) creating the changes to the file.

To identify which data is on a particular CICS Journal file, a CHECK (or scan) may be made where no data is moved, but a report is generated showing the number of changes for the desired file(s) on this journal, and optionally the details of each of these changes. This capability becomes very important in the case of corruption and can be invaluable when multiple files are involved.

Not all data recovery parameters must be specified. Only those which meet the needs of the recovery being done. In this case no transactions, no beginning or ending times or dates, and no special terminals are specified.

This example recovers all records for file EMPFILE from the CICS journals and applies them to the backup. It prints only those records for which data recovery errored and was not done.

This example recovers records for file EMPFILE from the CICS journals with transaction prefixes PA and EM but excludes transactions PAY1 and EMP2. It prints all records recovered.

RECOVER FCT(EMPFILE) TYPE(KSDS) RECFM(V)PRINT(ALL)
INCL-TRAN(PA**,EM**)
EXCL-TRAN(PAY1,EMP2)

Here all transactions from the CICS journals except those done with PAY1, PAY2, and EMP4 are applied to EMPFILE. It recovers only transactions done on February 20, 1993 (93/051) between 1:00 PM (13:00:00) and 1:45 PM (13:45:00). All records are printed.

RECOVER FCT(EMPFILE) TYPE(KSDS) RECFM(V) PRINT(ALL)
START-TIME(13:00:00) END-TIME(13:45:00)
START-DATE(93/051) END-DATE(93/051)
EXCL-TRAN(PAY1,PAY2,EMP4)

Multiple files can be recovered in a CICS/Forward Recovery System job. Standard MVS or VSE batch JCL is wrapped around as many RECOVER control cards as you wish.

CICS/Forward Recovery System installs in less than an hour and can quickly be tested on a copy of a backup file. No modification to the CICS journaling process is needed. CICS journals are maintained through standard CICS procedures. All you must do is use our JCL to run our CICS/Forward Recovery System program and specify the files to be recovered.

For your computer disaster recovery plan you can easily cost justify CICS/Forward Recovery System the first time you need it. It is an inexpensive solution to the problem of CICS data recovery.