New Autoloader, scheduling and rotation woes

[Outdoorchannel]

Hi all, We just purchased a new Magnum 224 autoloader. It's installed and BE 10d is seeing it just fine. I should start this by stating I'm fairly new to BE, and I already want to burn it at the stake... Ok now that that's out of the way here's my problem: I need to set up a rotation of tapes/jobs for the purposes of offsite storage. What I envisioned was a three week rotation, Set A, B and C. Each with 5 tapes for each day of the week. One week I want Set A to run and use the tapes sequentially based on their barcode so they can be identified. Monday uses, say A00001. Tuesday uses A00002 and so on. Once the next Monday comes, Set B should be up (the previous weeks backups, Set A, are sent offsite for a week). A00006 for Monday, A00007 for Tuesday, etc. The next Monday comes around and Set B is sent offsite while Set A returns and is reloaded. Now I want Set C to be backed up sequentially as with the previous sets. I've partitioned the Autoloader media into 4 total partitions. Three partitions of 5 tapes each (1 tape for each day of the work week of course) for the 3 backup sets, and the fourth partition holds the extra tapes. My main issue is getting the three jobs to run in the timeframe I want. I don't care what specific week of the month it is, I just want Set A to run one work week, then Set B the next, then C, and then back to A. The actual media rotation is slightly less important, I can deal with that by looking at the logs and matching up the barcodes if I need to restore anything. As I said, I'm kind of a BE nooblet, so any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Ken_Putnam]

Three partitions may be over-manageing things.  Unless there is a requirement that Set A be mounted during the week that you want to write to set C, just create a single partition, and load that week's 5 tapes into it

if you really do need  to mount two weeks worth of tapes at a time, go ahead and do that.

In either case, create only a single job using a Media Set that has an OPP of 16 days, and point it at "All Pools" rather than a specific partition 

To get the tapes used in slot order, thr first time a set is mounted, re-lable them starting with the low order slot.  After that BackupExec should always use the lowest tape number first based on it's least recently used logic

Also set the Global Media Management option to "Use overwritable media in target media set before scratch" rather than the other way around

[Outdoorchannel]

Ack!  I didn't know I was on HTML editing in my original post!  Wall of text.... eek!  Sorry about that. 

I didn't even think of using an OPP to force the media rotation, thanks!  I'm going to set it all up now.

[Ken_Putnam]

No prob

But make the OPP 13 days, not 16.  that would work for a tape closed on Friday, and reused the third following Monday.

For tapes re-used every third Monday or Tues etc, 13 days works out MUCH better

[Outdoorchannel]

Ah, ok.  Makes sense.  :)  Thanks again.

[Robert_Schmidt_]

As Ken said, the first time (only) through each group of tapes, you have to do a little manual intervention.

I do the 'add new' routine slightly differently to Ken. Either works. I put all of the new set of tapes in "retired media". Then, before each day's backup, I put the desired tape in "scratch". By the time the week/cycle is finished, their all in my "daily tapes" media set, in the desired order, with the allocation date set to re-use the next time around.

Cheers.