There are two main types of object operations: Interactive and Automated. For Automated, there are again two types: Post Backup and Scheduled.

The name of "Interactive" copy session clearly indicates that it is interactive, so not automatically run after a backup session or scheduled at a certain time. Any automated Object copy, however, is called "Automated" as it allows to create a copy specification based on a set of filters (Backup, Copy or Consolidation Spec, Object filter, Library filter) and let it run either Post Backup or Scheduled, but it can also be started manually. This is possible from the GUI by Right-clicking the Copy specification and selecting "Start copy ....":

Or it can be done from command line also with omniobjcopy, e.g.

omniobjcopy -copylist CopySpecificationName -scheduled [[GENERAL_OPTIONS]

So what is really the difference between an Interactive copy and an Automated one that is started manually? They are different in the way the objects to be copied are specified. With an interactive copy, specific object versions are selected based on Media, Objects or Sessions. For an Interactive Media copy for instance, it is possible to select one or more pools or to make a selection of specific media within pools or even specific objects on media. This is demonstrated in the following picture.

Also for the two other main selections (Objects and Sessions), it is possible to further drill down starting from that main selection.

With the automated copy, even when run manually, no specific object versions are selected, but selections are rather automatically done based on the specified filters, e.g. all objects generated by a specific backup specification and within a specified relative time frame. And a lot of different filters are available.

So an interactive copy may be handy for manually copying one or a handfull of specific object versions. But when a large selection needs to be made and manually selecting all those objects is becoming difficult, the usage of the Automated copy filtering may be more convenient and even when this is only run once and it is started manually, it may still be convenient to make use of the filtering in a scheduled copy specification (which is not necessarily really scheduled).

You may be interested to some of my other Support Tips too: Support Tips listed per category.