Symantec Backup Exec

Not really.  Suppose your job needs an overwriteable tape and there are a couple of overwriteable tapes in the library, BE will use the one with the oldest allocated date, regardless of the slot number.

Since you are using a tape library, life would be much easier if you do not trying to manage the tapes like what you propose to do.  Your scheme can easily be thrown off by the smallest hitch, like a failed job.  It would be better to let BE and the tape library manage the tapes for you.  See my article on this subject

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/must-mondays-backup-be-monday-tape

There's a couple of reason why we will need to label the tapes for Monday to be "Monday". Reason being that we need to send the tapes to cisco recall and in case of emergency recovery, we will know which dates of the tapes to be retrieved from them. Also, we do not need a backup administrator to change the tapes or retrieve the tapes from the libarary.

It's more like the processes of the company rather than a technical issue to label the tape as "Monday".

Which jobs will actually modify the allocation date of the tapes? Running inventory / associate media set / erase tape?

As I said in my article, you would be putting your tapes into some container to ship them off-site.  Label these container instead of labeling the tape.  For example, your Monday container may contain tape 000001L4.  Your processes are probably drawn up when you are using stand-alone tape drives.  You should review and adapt them when you using a tape library.

Also, if you choose to label your tapes this way, you would not be able to use barcode labels.  Barcode labels would improve your tape library operations immensely, like there would be no need to do an inventory in order to recognise your tapes.  See my article on this subject

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/using-barcode-labels-why-and-how

The allocated date is changed when you overwrite the tape.

We've adapt this process when we are using ARCServe backup as it can backup our infra with the tape library in sequence.

I think I might be a bit confusing here. When I said I've labelled the tape "Monday", it means that the tape is put into slot 1 of the tape library so that when the job kick starts, I'd hope that it can retrieve the tape in sequence from 1 to 7, Monday to Sunday. The "Monday" label is something recognized by the off-site vendor when we handed over the tapes.

I'm using bar codes currently right now. But other than the boosting the inventory operations & recognizing the tapes, is there any other functions with the bar codes that I can make use of?

I guess I can manually erase the tapes one by one to sort it out with the allocation date. Thus in this manner, I will not need to check the backup exec software everytime when a backup job finishes to see which tape it is using. Other than when the job fails.

I am confused.  If you are using barcode labels, then I would expect that your tape labels would be something like 000001L4.  Where does your Monday comes in?  Also, why is it so important that Monday's job write to slot 1 when it could be tape 000001L4 or tape 000002L4 in that slot.

If you really want you can partition each slot into 1 partition and target your jobs to each partition in turn, but this increases the number of your jobs and your scheduling.

The Monday label is another bar code sticker from Cisco. They'll use a bar code scanner to scan that into their inventory when we hand over the tapes.

Cisco comes down to our office everyday and we hand over our most recent tapes to them in case something major happen to our office.

I'm kind of ok with the job picking up random tapes from the library. Not necessary from slot 1. But the thing is that I will need to log into the server everyday to check which tape it is using isn't it? Whereas using ARCServe, I do not need to check on this. It will just pick up the tapes according to the slots and I will check on the server upon receiving notification of failure devices or jobs.

I see. I've migrated to Symantec Backup Exec because of the VMWare integration. I love that.

Unfortunately I am faced with this tiny little issue here. grrrrr

I'll try your method and see if I can go ahead with it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

As in all new things, there is a period of getting use to it and adapting to the way it does things.