Performing an Auto Pilot backup with a changer

SCO ARCserve/Open's Auto Pilot allows you to schedule daily, weekly, and monthly backups of your file servers and hosts. Auto Pilot takes care of the tapes you will be using by:

formatting blank ones
prompting you for the required tape (rotation). With a single tape drive, Auto Pilot only needs you to insert the required tape into the tape drive.

When you use a changer, the process becomes even more automated, as the changer can now store all the needed tapes, and load the appropriate tape every time an Auto Pilot job takes off. This automatic backup feature provides the perfect complement to your changer, minimizing the number of times you have to change tapes. Depending on the type of changer and rotation scheme, you may not have to load tapes for up to a year.

For more specific examples of how Auto Pilot selects and formats tapes in the changer, see ``Using Auto Pilot with your Changer''.

Ted, the network administrator for a large bank, needs to back up the network every day without fail. In the past, there have been problems. Sometimes someone would forget to load a tape, or to schedule a job. By investing in SCO ARCserve/Open and a changer, he hopes to finally obtain reliable backups of his network.

The following steps help Ted set up the perfect Auto Pilot set for his network.

Select the backup sources.
From the Backup Manager window, select the nodes you want to include:
Set Run options for this job.
Click the Run button. The following screen displays:
Click the Setup button.
The default Auto Pilot window displays.
Name the Auto Pilot set.
Ted names his set ``ENGINEER''.
Choose the backup method.
Since Ted wants a full backup once a week, and only changed files for the rest of the week, he selects ``Differential backup - based on modified date'' (which means only back up files that have been changed since the last full backup).

When setting up any Auto Pilot job, make sure you have at least one full backup a week.

For a full description of available backup methods, see ``Using Auto Pilot'' in the SCO ARCserve/Open from Cheyenne User Guide.
Indicate how many tapes you want to use before they can be reused.
Ted wants to rotate (re-use) his daily tapes often, but save his monthly tapes for a year because he stores them off-site. For this example, Ted needs 21 tapes total (4 daily tapes, 5 weekly tapes and 12 monthly tapes).
Click OK.
The job gets submitted to the SCO ARCserve/Open queue:
After the job runs, check the Daily Log.
After each Auto Pilot job, check the Daily Log for important information, such as:
- The name of the tape that was used for the backup
- What tape to use next
- Any information about the job (including missed targets, or other errors)
Ted's Daily Log, ENGINEER.DLY, would look like the following:

Based on Ted's Auto Pilot needs, his changer will require 21 tapes per year. Since Ted has a changer with a 10-tape capacity, he can fill all the slots in the changer with blank tapes (since Auto Pilot requires blank tapes initially when it performs its backups so that it can format them), and not have to worry about backups until those tapes have been used (about 1 1/2 months).

SCO ARCserve/Open will automatically load the correct tape needed for each day's backup.

The only type of administration required from Ted is that he scan Auto Pilot's Daily and Full Logs to make sure that the backups are completing successfully and to troubleshoot any problems he may be having with his network.