I've been place in charge of backups for one of the servers, the person that used to take care of it, is no longer with the company. I've had about 5 minutes of training, it's no too hard to place a tape in the machine, however, anything more than that I'm not sure of. I'd like to document what's on the machine for future reference. Is there a newbie guide? Cheers!!
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What's the best way to take over admin or Arcserver?
- Thread starter rickg
- Start date
Hi Rick,
Arcserve is a fairly easy product to use once you start to play with it a little. I knew nothing about the product until about 6 months ago and now am a pretty advanced user when it comes to it.
The first thing you should do is try and find out what version you are working with. Once you have that you can always post messages here on the forum. I would suggest trying to see if you have a manual around that came with the product and start there. Otherwise, check out Computer Associates Website for soe info on the product:
Good Luck!
Darryl Brambilla
EDS Canada
Calgary, AB
Arcserve is a fairly easy product to use once you start to play with it a little. I knew nothing about the product until about 6 months ago and now am a pretty advanced user when it comes to it.
The first thing you should do is try and find out what version you are working with. Once you have that you can always post messages here on the forum. I would suggest trying to see if you have a manual around that came with the product and start there. Otherwise, check out Computer Associates Website for soe info on the product:
Good Luck!
Darryl Brambilla
EDS Canada
Calgary, AB
Howdy Rick,
I was in the same position a few months ago. Good place to start is (as mentioned above); I haven't been wowed by their knowledge base, but they do have product manuals in pdf format and decent explanations of error codes. I would also make sure you have the latest service pack or patches for your version.
I basically tried to start from scratch and rebuild the backup process. I re-installed ArcServe and assembled a new backup procedure with documentation. This takes a lot more time, and may not be an option for you, but I wanted the confidence I understood what the product was doing and could troubleshoot any issues, and wasn't just changing tapes.
For a couple weeks I ran manual backups during the day until I had confidence my schedule job would run correctly every night, but now I can rattle off the top of my head every setting in our configuration and give you (or my boss) the reasoning behind having one option and not another.
Do not neglect documentation. We have 4 color-coded sets of tapes in a four week rotation. I inherited a calendar with colored stickers indicating which set was used each week. That was it.
In one way, this was an advantage--I had nothing to loose by trashing the previous setup and building my own. The previous backups were basically useless because I had no way of _quickly_ knowing which tapes were good and what errors had occurred. When the CEO says he accidentally deleted his presentation for today's board meeting, you don't have time to search the logs to confirm the last good backup.
So you will have some document that is updated every time a tape is changed. You should have a way to identify that tape, the date the backup was run (I use yesterday's date since the job ran last night), and a success/fail indication with any error codes and corrective action taken if there were any errors. I also track the backup type (full, differential, etc), media name (set by the backup job--changes each time the tape is used and not the same as the label used to identify the tape by sight), store location (on site, off site, etc), media pool (daily, weekly, monthly if you're using a GFS scheme), and initials of the person who swapped the tape and updated the log.
The other document you have is all the information you and I should have received from our predecessors. What options was the product installed with, what's the current service pack, how often do the backups run, are the daily backups differential or incremental (and what's the difference)? Again, starting from scratch was an advantage. Rather than reverse engineer what someone else had configured, as I setup ArcServe I took notes on each step.
It's not a replacement for the product manual. It's a lot of short sentences and bullet points. And when you're on vacation and get a call the backup server just exploded, it's easier to say, 'find this document, print it out,' than talk someone through the configuration. If you document as you go, it won't take much time.
Yikes, didn't mean to write an essay, but as I said, I was in the same position. If you'd like to see an example of the spreadsheet I use to track backups, email me off list.
HTH
Sean
sgerman@sprockets.com
I was in the same position a few months ago. Good place to start is (as mentioned above); I haven't been wowed by their knowledge base, but they do have product manuals in pdf format and decent explanations of error codes. I would also make sure you have the latest service pack or patches for your version.
I basically tried to start from scratch and rebuild the backup process. I re-installed ArcServe and assembled a new backup procedure with documentation. This takes a lot more time, and may not be an option for you, but I wanted the confidence I understood what the product was doing and could troubleshoot any issues, and wasn't just changing tapes.
For a couple weeks I ran manual backups during the day until I had confidence my schedule job would run correctly every night, but now I can rattle off the top of my head every setting in our configuration and give you (or my boss) the reasoning behind having one option and not another.
Do not neglect documentation. We have 4 color-coded sets of tapes in a four week rotation. I inherited a calendar with colored stickers indicating which set was used each week. That was it.
In one way, this was an advantage--I had nothing to loose by trashing the previous setup and building my own. The previous backups were basically useless because I had no way of _quickly_ knowing which tapes were good and what errors had occurred. When the CEO says he accidentally deleted his presentation for today's board meeting, you don't have time to search the logs to confirm the last good backup.
So you will have some document that is updated every time a tape is changed. You should have a way to identify that tape, the date the backup was run (I use yesterday's date since the job ran last night), and a success/fail indication with any error codes and corrective action taken if there were any errors. I also track the backup type (full, differential, etc), media name (set by the backup job--changes each time the tape is used and not the same as the label used to identify the tape by sight), store location (on site, off site, etc), media pool (daily, weekly, monthly if you're using a GFS scheme), and initials of the person who swapped the tape and updated the log.
The other document you have is all the information you and I should have received from our predecessors. What options was the product installed with, what's the current service pack, how often do the backups run, are the daily backups differential or incremental (and what's the difference)? Again, starting from scratch was an advantage. Rather than reverse engineer what someone else had configured, as I setup ArcServe I took notes on each step.
It's not a replacement for the product manual. It's a lot of short sentences and bullet points. And when you're on vacation and get a call the backup server just exploded, it's easier to say, 'find this document, print it out,' than talk someone through the configuration. If you document as you go, it won't take much time.
Yikes, didn't mean to write an essay, but as I said, I was in the same position. If you'd like to see an example of the spreadsheet I use to track backups, email me off list.
HTH
Sean
sgerman@sprockets.com
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