Configuring Backup Exec for tape rotation with a large number of tapes

[matt_jones1]

I've been scratching my head about this for a while now, and can't seem to come up with anything quite right...

I have a Dell PowerVault ML6020 with 100 LTO-5 tapes.   Our backups include incrementals performed Monday-Thursday nights, with full backups running every Saturday and Sunday.  A full week's worth of backups takes between 20-23 tapes.

Right now, no tapes are rotated and we aren't using off-site storage, but we'd like to start.  At the moment, the idea is a 4 week tape rotation period, swapping out 25 tapes once a week (not quite a grandfather, father, son strategy, but hey...

I have no problem exporting and importing tapes, but I'm trying to find a good way to configure Backup Exec to make the rotation easier than manually scrolling through the media and hand-picking the 20 or so tapes that were written to last week.

I guess the question is:  How can I configure Backup Exec to easily write to and then export tapes 1-25 the first week, 26-50 the second week, etc?  Or am I just thinking about this way to hard?

[RahulG]

Creating parition in you Linrary might Help you. Once you configure a paroitition in your library , you can pecify the job to run on the parition you want and the job will only use the tapes in that partition >

[matt_jones1]

I had considered that, but wouldn't that mean I would need 4 duplicates of each job or backup policy, eahc configured for a different partition?

[pkh]

Have you looked at creating vaults?  You can then use the vault wizard to move tapes to the vault using rules.