We have an 8 tape loader and typically load it with 4 tapes for this week's backup and 4 for next weeks. Our tapes are named Set 1-A, Set 1-B, Set 1-C, Set 1-D, Set 2-A, Set 2-B, Set 2-C, and Set 2-D, etc. When we load the tapes, they are in order such that slot 1 contains Set 1-A, slot 2 contains Set 1-B, ... slot 5 contains Set 2-A, etc.
The problem (or maybe inconvenience) is that when backups run it appears to randomly select a slot and tape to start with. We would really like it to start with slot 1 and move on as needed.
I saw some other posts that discussed creating partitions to do this, but it sounds like that only works if we want each job to use a different partition, but this is not what we are looking for. We run the same two jobs every day to do incrementals and would like to continue doing this as opposed to creating different jobs for each day.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks for your assistance.