Tape ejects when full

[BaldMan]

Hello,

We are currently running BE 11d, and backing up to a stand-alone tape device with a single tape drive.  We inherrited this setup, would rather have a library of tapes. 

My problem is that when the tape gets full it ejects and we need to go the device to put in a new tape. 

Is there a setting I can change to allow it to overwrite starting from the beginning of the tape when it gets full, rather than just ejecting and waiting for a new tape?

I thought of changing the setting for the backups to overwrite the media without appending, but thats probably not a good solution as each backup will end up overwriting the previous.

Any suggestions would be great, and please let me know if any more info is needed.

Thanks in advance.

[Ken_Putnam]

My problem is that when the tape gets full it ejects and we need to go the device to put in a new tape. 

Is there a setting I can change to allow it to overwrite starting from the beginning of the tape when it gets full, rather than just ejecting and waiting for a new tape?

Nope, if you did that, you'd lose all the data written at the end of the tape

How much can each tape hold?  How much is a backup?  How many tapes do you have?  How long do you want to keep the data?

[BaldMan]

The tapes are 800 GB

The backup sizes are 90 GB daily, and once a week we backup system images totalling about 360 GB

I was able to use 1 tape for a full week, now i am at the beginning of the rotation, 20 tapes total, so i am running into the backups appending to the end of the tape.  Not a big deal, except when the tape runs out it ejects and I get failed backups because I cant get to the co-lo to change it right away.  

The backups were started at the middle of February,  so I am overwriting data that is now almost 8 months old. 

I'm thinking 3 week data retention, i can get several days worth of data on1 tape.  It's that weekly snapshot that hurts.