Using a new tape

There may be an occasion when you want to introduce a new tape into the Auto Pilot rotation scheme, and retire an old one. Consider the following example:

Jim decides to check the Tape Media Report for each of his daily Auto Pilot tapes and discovers that one of the tapes has been generating a lot of errors. Jim decides that he'd like to take this tape out of rotation and introduce a new one.

The easiest way to remove a tape from the rotation cycle is to go into SCO ARCserve/Open's Tape Database (through the Database Manager) and delete the tape from the database (marking that tape destroyed). If you delete a daily tape from the database, and you are preserving 4 daily tapes, you will now need to introduce a new tape to the daily rotation. You don't need to worry about when you should use a blank tape for the daily job, the Auto Pilot Daily Log will tell you.

You can also introduce a new tape without taking any tape out of the rotation cycle by just inserting a blank one instead of the one Auto Pilot calls for. Just remember that Auto Pilot always looks to reuse the oldest tape in the database, and you've just increased by one the number of tapes in that particular 'bin' (depending on the day you introduced the tape). For example, if Jim used a blank tape instead of reusing a daily tape, then he would have 5 daily tapes to recycle through now, not 4.