I’m sometimes bemused by gaping holes in the IBMi operating arena.

What do I mean by this?

The IBM i Operating System is fantastically robust, powerful yet simple to use. It’s evolved from the early days of CPF on the System/3x machines, up through the OS400 years and now in its latest and greatest iteration of the ‘IBM i’ operating system. During this time the operating system has resolutely stuck to a command driven GUI (“Don’t worry, I’m not going to moan about the lack of a point/click GUI interface today”).

IBM i has incredible functionality in its ability to interface with any operating system in the world and really cool functions like the IFS – which makes the IBM i storage area look and act just like a windows server.

But here we are in 2012 and there is still no really simple way of transferring data to your IBM i system. Obviously there is more than one way to skin a cat, but the main techniques are (a) use the data transfer function in the IBM i Access client software or (b) use FTP to upload/download *SAVEFILES from your Windows/Apple/Linux/Machine of choice.

SAVEFILES, or *SAVF as they are referred in IBM i land, are a special file that contains a backup of anything from an individual IBM i object to a whole library of objects. Think of a *SAVF as the IBM i equivalent of a ZIP file.

Simply put we can just FTP a *SAVF up into IBMi very simply, but must remember to tell FTP a couple of things to let it know how to handle conversion of these special *SAVF data types.

Question:

Nick has emailed me a Windows ZIP file called PROJEXSHIP.ZIP – and this contains an IBMi file called PROJEXSHIP.SAVF – how to I upload this to my IBMi system?

Answer:

UPLOAD USING FTP

Unzip the projexship.savf into a folder on your C: drive called C:\projex

OK, so now we have a *SAVF on your PC. It doesn’t really matter what the file extension is, but I use ‘.SAVF’ to keep things clear.

Now lets start FTP and send the SAVF to your your-IBMi-machine. If your in Windows just click START | RUN and enter ‘FTP’ as the command:

FTP your-IBMi-machine enter username enter password 
lcd \projex - switches you to the local directory called C:\Projex 
cd QGPL - switches you to QGPL Library in IBMi 
bin - go into binary transfer mode 
put projexship.savf - this will upload the SAVF to your machine in file QGPL/PROJEXSHIP

…and thats it! if you did it properly, your FTP window should look something like this:

When the FTP process has completed you will have a *SAVF in QGPL called PROJEXSHIP.

Simple enough once you know what to do… but don’t forget that BINARY command.

To check the check the save file is valid simply check that it contains the ProjexSHIP library using:

DSPSAVF QGPL/PROJEXSHIP

Obviously if you want to download a *SAVF just do it all in reverse.