One of the areas we are looking to improve with the new UI is scheduling scripts. First time users are baffled and even long-time users are frequently amazed at finding some existing feature. Below, we will go through some screenshots to show off the new design. If you've downloaded the beta at http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retrospect8/publicbeta, you can play along at home.
The following is the schedule tab for a newly created script:
Not much to do or see here except click the "+" icon. Doing that gives you the default schedule below:
The default schedule is to back up every week, Monday through Friday, starting at 10:00 PM. For backup scripts, you can choose the Media Set this schedule will go to via the Destination menu. Hopefully, it is pretty obvious that you can set the first start date via the calendar and the time each backup will occur by typing in the start field.
Clicking the menu next to the repeat label gives you the following options:
Never is useful for scheduling one-off actions, like doing a catch-up backup at the end of day. Hourly and daily allow you to schedule repeating backups, to occur every six hours for example, or every two days. This last option allows you to set up a rotating backup to back up to alternating media every day, as seen in the next screenshot.
The last repeat type, monthly, comes in handy where you may want to back up to an off-site media or take advantage of Retrospect's media actions to create a new Media Set before backing up or to recycle (overwrite) an existing Media Set.
The above screenshot shows the other media actions. "No media action" was formerly called "Normal" but that term confused too many novice users. This tells Retrospect to follow its default behavior: Start fresh if the Media Set is empty, otherwise append data to the media. Let us know if you like the new terminology. The menu next to "month(s)" allows you to pick other options like "on the second Saturday" or "on the last Saturday."
Finally, let's go back to the "weekly" repeat type and look at the last option:
For schedules that repeat on fixed days of the week, while we default to the normal approach of running the backup until it is complete, we also expose a feature that was formerly hidden in Script Options, the ability to stop a script at a fixed time. This is useful for making sure backups stop before the normal work-day begins. This ability to set backup windows is at the heart of Proactive Backup (Backup Server scripts in 6.1) and we will talk more about the scheduling interface for those scripts in our next post.
-JG