You cannot run one job across 2 drives, if you need this facility NetBackup provides it. (I believe)

So to use both drives have 2 jobs running at the same time.

Ok thanks Colin for confirming what I expected.  Do you know why some of the jobs are failing when there are 2 tapes in slot partition 1-5 that are overwritable and have space.  Are there any limitations around the partitions and number of tapes in each partition?

Hi Pete

 SOrry but why tapes are not used might depend on settings that you have not provided (i.e media set information) and also on the state of the media at the time of the backup (for instance say your jobs start at 21:00 and you come in the next day and one has not run, however by the time you look that following morning the tape is overwritable, does not mean it was overwritable at 21:00 when the job tried to run)

If you simply partition your library, without properly setting up your media set, you are very likely to have problems like yours.  You should set up your media sets properly so that tapes are available for your jobs. 

Hi, my media set is appendable & overwritable and was when the jobs started as it executed some of the jobs.

Tape 1 and 2 are blank to start with

Job1 -> Tape Device Pool

Job2 -> Tape Device Pool

Job3 -> Tape Device Pool

etc

Tape 1 would be approx 750GB and Tape 2 would be 1200GB (both with space) and then Job3 would try and write to Slot3 (empty) and fail even though the tapes in Slots 1 and 2 have free, appendable space.

What is the AP of the media set that the tapes belongs to?  If it is too short, then when Job 3 starts, it will not find an appendable tape.  A tape does not only have to have free space for a job to append to it, but the append period of the tape must not have expired.

To understand the AP better, read this document

OPP and AP explanation