by steve-myers » Mon Apr 11, 2011 8:15 am
Most shops keep good backups. The usual method to recover an unintentionally deleted dataset is to recover the dataset from the backup. Contact your site's support for assistance.
OS/360 type systems have never had a tool to semi-automatically "undelete" a deleted dataset. Recovery from a backup is your only practical solution. When you delete a dataset its VTOC entry is rewritten as binary 0s, though, generally, the data is not wiped.
In theory, if you know the first extent starting address (which usually is not known), you can use ABSTR in JCL to allocate the first extent. This probably would not work for a PDS since allocation writes an empty directory, and allocation in some shops overwrites the first track of a dataset with an EOF "record" to make it moderately difficult to read the previous contents of the dataset. ABSTR allocation will not work for SMS managed datasets since ABSTR does not work for SMS managed datasets.