Migrating Data for Extended Homesteading
April 5, 2012
Update: Added advice from Brian Edminster on using Jeff Vance's free UDC, UDCVOL.
The redoubtable 3000-L mailing list still boasts more than 600 readers, and more than 100 of them answer questions about 3000 operations. The discussion helps homesteaders, or those who are making moves to extend the life of 3000s.
Or replace them with other 3000s. A reseller recently asked for help on data migration of the homestead variety. He got instructions useful for anyone populating a fresh disc with production data.
I'm using MPE/iX 6.5 on a 9x7 3000, and trying to move data from a system volume set to a private volume set. I made a full backup and have created a private volume set, but I'm having problems restoring my data to the private volume set.
Craig Lalley of EchoTech replied:
You need to build the accounts and groups on the private volume before the restore. On the old system, run BULDACCT like this
acct_list%VSACCT=user_set
Purge the old accounts, then STREAM BULDJOB1. This will build the "buckets," the accounts/groups on the private volume. Then do the restore.
Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies took note of a free program to control volume operations.
An even better idea is to use Jeff Vance's Volume Mgmt UDC's, available at the OpenMPE 'JAZZ' page. It's a step up from doing it manually, because you can set up a config file that will automagically put accounts/groups on the proper volumes. I use this on all my systems, and for all my clients that have non-system volumes. (Basically, anybody with a system big enough to have more than one disk)
Purging that old account was part of several replies to the question. Keven Miller of 3K Ranger said, "You can avoid doing the NEWACCT,NEWGROUP,ALT... yourself by using the ;CREATE and ;VOLSET=p-volume on the restore. But you will likely want to purge the old account first."
Tracy Johnson of Measurement Specialties said that the concept for the migration is "to make duplicate accounts with NEWACCT on the new volume set with the ONVS parameter, as well as any NEWGROUP commands you may need. Once done, you need to ALTGROUP the groups with the HOMEVS parameter. A pair of job streams can be created with the BULDACCT command. And purging the old data is a good idea. Otherwise you end up with phantom disc space usage."