Can I force the next job to append to existing tapes with free space?

[Alboski]

Hi,  Is it possible to make BE 2010 append to a tape with existing free space?  

My current situation is that if a small backup job only uses a very small fraction of that tape, the next backup job will not use the remainder, it will pick out a new tape.  I'm finding we're chewing through tapes and running out of spare media before the weekend backup is completed.

[pkh]

Sure.  Set the AP of the media set that the tape belongs to, to a longer period, e.g. 1 day.  Then set the job property to "append, otherwise overwrite"

[Alboski]

Thanks PKH,

The media sets are already set with an apend period of five days..  could this be a bug? We keep the system up to date with LiveUpdate. 

[pkh]

Is your job set to append?

Are there any overlap between your jobs?  That is, one job starts while the other is still running.  When a job is running, the media is marked as unappendable.  When the next job starts at this time, it will not be able to find an appendable media and then it will switch to overwrite mode.  When it finally finished waiting and start, it will use an overwriteable media and will not switch back to the append mode.  If there is overlap between your jobs, make sure that you schedule them in such a way that there is no overlap.

Note that a job will only append to the first tape, for the second and subsequent tapes, it will need an overwriteable tape.  It cannot append to a second tape.

[Ken_Putnam]

Do your jobs use the same media set?