Arcserve Backup Overview

Arcserve Backup consists of two components:

• Arcserve Backup Manager
• Arcserve Backup Server

The Arcserve Backup Manager

The Arcserve Backup Manager is the application you use to manage your Arcserve Backup jobs. All configurations for Arcserve Backup operations are handled here. You specify a source and, sometimes, a destination. From the Arcserve Backup Manager you have complete control over all aspects of your past, active and future jobs. You can configure and manage the storage devices, the database and media pools. Optional features such as advanced options, filters, and logs and reports are specified here, too. When you are done, the Arcserve Backup Manager packages all this information together, and submits it to the Arcserve Backup server.

The Arcserve Backup Server

The Arcserve Backup Server is composed of three separate server modules. These server modules (commonly referred to as "engines") are the:

• Database Engine
• Job Engine
• Tape Engine

The Arcserve Backup Server performs the operation. The engines work together to back up, copy, restore, and perform all the Arcserve Backup jobs you submitted through the Arcserve Backup Manager.

The Database Engine

This engine is responsible for maintaining the history of several things:

• Files, directories, drives, and machines that Arcserve Backup has backed up or copied.
• Information about jobs that have been processed by Arcserve Backup, such as the type, the final result, the start and the end time.
• Media used by Arcserve Backup, includes its name, the date it was first formatted, the date it expires, and the sessions on it.

By default, everything that happens within Arcserve Backup is recorded by the Database Engine.

The Tape Engine

The Tape Engine is responsible for communicating with and controlling your storage devices. The Tape Engine performs all of the actual reading and writing from the media devices. When media is needed for a Arcserve Backup job, the Tape Engine tells your hardware that its media is needed.

The Job Engine

The Job Engine is responsible for processing your jobs at their designated date and time. It constantly scans the job queue searching for a job that is ready to run then takes the job and sends it off to the appropriate handler for the job.

Equivalence

Arcserve Backup uses its own authentication mechanism for management purposes. It creates a caroot default user during setup that you can use to log in to the Manager.

Arcserve Backup allows you to create an equivalence for a Windows account to caroot. Any Windows account on any host can be granted same access privileges as caroot. The equivalence does an implicit log in on behalf of the logged in user. You can set the password for caroot during setup and modify it later on using ca_auth.exe. You need to know the password for caroot for setting up equivalences.

Console utilities such as ca_backup, ca_restore, and ca_qmgr work with remote Arcserve Backup servers for submitting and monitoring backup/restore jobs without requiring users to log in to Arcserve Backup every time for each command.