Hi there,

What sort of backup jobs are you running? Daily, weekly, monthly, or just 1 set?
If it is a GFS policy for example, consider partitioning your autoloader first-off. This will create logical partitions on the autoloader which you would use to direct jobs too in BEWS. This means keeping track of which tapes go where, and get ejected a lot easier.
If you don't have a type of job in mind  yet, I would consider doing either a Differential or INcremental job. Backing up 9TB every night is going to take forever, no matter how fast that LTO4 drive runs, even at its maximum 120MB/s. We back up a 3.8TB on a FC-connected IBM LTO4 library, and it completes in about 8 hours or so.
So, do the following:

1. Create partitions and direct jobs to those partitions.
2. Create a GFS policy and choose the option to use either Incremental/Differential backups. Run the full backup over a weekend if possible, and it will make all subsequent jobs a lot smaller.

Laters!

You can set up a policy such that after the backup is done, the tapes used are exported to the portal of the autoloader.  Since your backup would require at least 9 tapes, someone would need to be around to remove the tapes from the portal as they are exported.

Otherwise, someone would need to check the job log, identify the tapes used and remove them from the autoloader.

Thanks for the responses guys. If they are to take a copy offsite each week then I guess they will need at least 2 full backups a week - as they won't be able to quickly restore from an offsite backup.
I don't see that having someone remove the tapes as they are written will work well as I assume the job will be on hold until the tape is removed.
I guess I need to see exactly how big the backup job is and how long it takes and make a decision from there on how to size the partitions.
-Al

> I don't see that having someone remove the tapes as they are written will work well as I assume the job will be on hold until the tape is removed.

No.  This is not the case.  Assuming that your job needs 4 tapes, as the backup job runs, it will use the tapes and then return them to their respective slots when they are done.  If you had set up a policy to export these tapes, then after the backup job is done, the export job will run.  Assuming that your autoloader has 1 portal, the first tape would placed in the portal and the user would be prompted to remove it.  When it is removed, the second tape would be placed in the portal and then another prompt would be issued to remove the tape.  This process would be repeated for the 3rd and 4th tapes.  If you don't remove, the tapes in time, the export job would fail, not the backup job.

Any news here...?