Earlier in this chapter, we discussed dividing your tapes into daily, weekly, and monthly bins. This is so you could get used to the idea that Auto Pilot always rotates tapes from the appropriate bin, that is, daily tapes are always taken from the daily tape bin, weekly tapes are always taken from the weekly tape bin, and monthly tapes are always taken from the monthly tape bin.

Initially, you filled each bin with the correct number of blank tapes based on the rotation scheme you specified while setting up your Auto Pilot Job.

Eventually, Auto Pilot formats and uses each of the blank tapes and then starts to ``recycle'' the tapes in the bins. In the case of the daily tapes in the above example, Auto Pilot knows to recycle tapes by checking that four daily backups have been made. ARCserve's Tape List database shows that four daily Auto Pilot tapes have been formatted and used.

When the next daily backup comes around, Auto Pilot will ask you to insert the oldest daily backup tape in the drive. From the above figure, this would be D-SHIPPING-WED-6/15/94.

Consider this example:

Naomi has set Auto Pilot to perform a differential backup on Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and a full backup on Friday.

Monday through Thursday, Naomi pulls her daily tapes from the daily bin. On Friday, the full backup is the weekly backup, so she pulls that tape from the weekly bin. Refer to ``Tape recycle'' for a full description of bins and tape recycling.

The last full backup of the week is always the weekly backup. If the only full backup was done on Tuesday, then that would be a weekly backup and you would use a tape from the weekly bin.

How do you know which tape to insert when? Check the Auto Pilot daily log for your Auto Pilot Set. The top of the log always tells you what tape you need to insert for the next Auto Pilot job.

So, Monday through Friday, Naomi uses the tapes from the daily tape bin. On Friday, for the full backup, Naomi uses a tape from the weekly bin. For the following Monday, Auto Pilot looks at the tape database and sees that four Auto Pilot daily tapes exist. It also sees which tape is the oldest daily tape and therefore the one that will be recycled for Monday's backup.