Archive mainframe data to Cloud Storage

This page describes how you can archive and restore your mainframe data to Cloud Storage by using Mainframe Connector.

Before you begin

Archive mainframe files to Cloud Storage

To archive files from your mainframe to Cloud Storage, follow these steps:

Create a storage bucket for your archives. When creating the bucket, make sure to choose the Archive storage class.
You can archive your mainframe binary data as is to a Cloud Storage bucket. To do this, use the scp command as follows:
```
scp --inDD=INPUT_DD
--gcsOutUri=URI
--encoding=ENCODING
–-noConvert
```
Replace the following:
- INPUT_DD: the data definition (DD) file to be copied. The default value is DD INFILE.
- URI: the destination Cloud Storage uniform resource identifier (URI) of the file to be copied.
- ENCODING: the input character encoding. The default value is CP037.
Note: Optionally, you can convert your mainframe binary data to an ORC, CSV, or JSON file to a Cloud Storage bucket using the qsam decode command.

Restore a file from Cloud Storage to your mainframe

You can use the gsutil cp command to restore a file from Cloud Storage to a mainframe dataset. Note that you cannot copy partitioned data sets (PDS).

To restore a file from Cloud Storage to a mainframe dataset, use the following steps:

Specify the DSN and space requirements of the file you want to download to your mainframe in JCL. In the following example, the record format (RECFM) in the output file is FB. Modify the OUTFILE DD to fit your requirements.

//OUTFILE  DD DSN=MAINFRAME.DSN.FILE,DISP=(,CATLG),
//            RECFM=FB,DSORG=PS,
//            SPACE=(10,(2,1),RLSE),
//            AVGREC=M,
//            UNIT=SYSDA
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSDUMP  DD SYSOUT=*
//STDIN DD *

Run the gsutil cp command in the following format. If the file already exists on your Mainframe, make sure that you add the --replace flag to the command.
```
gsutil cp GCS_URI DSN --recfm=RECFM --lrecl=LRECL --blksize=BLKSIZE --noseek
```
Replace the following:
- GCS_URI: the Cloud Storage URI of the Cloud Storage file. For example, gs://bucket/sample.mainframe.dsn.
- DSN: the DSN destination location on the mainframe.
- RECFM: the record format (RECFM) of the mainframe file. The valid values are F, FB, and U. Note that these values are case-insensitive.
- LRECL: (optional) the record length (LRECL) of the file. The value must be an integer >= 0. If LRECL is not specified the file is assumed to be in the undefined-length record format (U).
- BLKSIZE: (Optional) The block-size of the file. If set to 0, the system will determine the optimal block-size. The value must be an integer >= 0. If you don't specify a value, the file is treated as an unblocked file.
- noseek: (Optional) Include this parameter if you want to improve download performance. This flag is set to false by default, that is, seek operations are enabled.