The Disaster Restore Backup application has a built in scheduler that hooks into the Windows Scheduling service for you.  Once you’ve done a successful backup of Unity, you can access this feature in the Options | Schedule Regular Backups menu item.

Before scheduling a backup, first make sure you’ve done a complete backup in “regular” interactive mode.  This ensures the account you’re logged in as has the appropriate SQL rights and that the location for writing backup files to is configured properly.  If there is no path set for the backup, the schedule backup will simply be aborted and an error will be logged in the application event log.

To schedule a backup, select the “Schedule Regular Backups” item in the Options menu.  This will launch the Schedule dialog (above) which interfaces into the build in Windows scheduler.  You may see other scheduled tasks in the list that are not related to the Disaster Recovery Backup tool itself.  You can edit their properties or delete them from in here but you can only add new tasks specific to the Backup Tool via this dialog.  Use the Windows Scheduler itself if you want to schedule other types of tasks.

To add a new schedule, hit the ‘Schedule Backup’ button.  Provide a display name that will be shown in the schedule list to describe this task.  Next, set the properties for the backup task.  Do not adjust the path or the command line options, those are set for you automatically.  By default the task is not enabled, be sure to check the “Enabled” option at the bottom of the “Task” tab.  You set when and how often this task runs on the “Schedule” tab.  When you have it configured as you’d like, click “OK”.  You will be asked to provide the login name and PW of the account you’d like this task to run under.  Provide the account you’ve done a backup with before to be sure it has the rights to attach to SQL and do backups.

 As noted above, when scheduled backups are run the backup log is written to as normal.  Each error has a source of “UnityDisasterRecoveryBackup” and a category of “Backup Status”.  The following event log entries will be written to the Applications Event log during unattended backups:

Event ID “1”.  “Unity Disaster Recovery Backup started”

Event ID “2”, “Unity Disaster Recovery Backup finished”

Event ID “3”, “Unity Disaster Recovery Backup failed.  Reason=xxxx” where “xxxx” is the error string returned by the external component that failed (i.e. if SQL failed to allow the UnityDB table to be backed up).

Event ID “4”, “Unity Disaster Recovery Backup: successfully backed up %1 mailboxes” where %1 is the number of subscriber mailboxes successfully backed up.

Event ID “5”, “Unity Disaster Recovery Backup: errors encountered backing up %1 mailboxes.  See exMerge.log for more details” where %1 is the number of mailboxes that had failures during backup.