AS/400 Backup

This article presents various techniques and strategies to integrate IBM System i® AS/400 with Bacula Enterprise. Its aim is to present solutions for Bacula Enterprise 6.0 and IBM System i5/OS v5r4 and later, which are not applicable to prior versions.

The AS/400 machine architecture is different from that of most other machines in the industry, especially the usual systems at the server level.

Unlike the “everything is a file” feature of Unix and its derivatives, on AS/400 everything is an object (with built-in persistence and garbage collection). AS/400 also offers Unix-like file directories using the Integrated File System.

Bacula Enterprise doesn’t provide a native AS/400 File Daemon program. However, as the AS/400 system provides its own set of commands to back up objects from disk to tape, to virtual tape or to a file (savefile), the administrator can use those certified commands to create backup, and transfer savefiles or virtual tapes to the Bacula Enterprise server.

A word of caution is that you must still maintain proper tape based saves of the system (SAVE option 22) because you’ll need that to restore a system sufficiently to be able to return the virtual tape images to the system in order to restore from them.