The change made by APAR IC22970 is "by design", since the orignal design
should have never permitted deleting volhistory for the most recent
DB Backup series.
The DELete VOLHistory command was only intended to allow pruning of obsolete
volume records. Any volume history for database dump, database backup, or
export where the volumes reside in an automated library, if deleted, will
result in the volumes being returned to scratch staus and are available for
reuse, if they were acquired as scratch volumes initially. If the volumes
are of devtype=FILE, the files are deleted. Bottom line, if the volhistory
is gone and a DB restore is required, the user would have to re-assemble
all of the volumes in the order in which they were written to. That assumes
that the volumes have not been re-used or otherwise over-written.
So consider this an ounce of prevention versus tons of cure.

Tom Brooks
ADSM Development