We used to do full daily backups to individual partitions on our 8 slot autoloader. For example, on Monday, we had a job to overwrite the tape in slot (partition) 0001..0001 and on Tuesday we had a separate job set to overwrite the tape in 0002..0002, and so on. We had no overwrite protection or append protection set because we didn't need it.

Now our jobs are too big to fit on one tape and I'm not sure where to go from here. I've reconfigured our changer to have one large partition 0001..0006 and one job that runs on MTWRF set to append, then overwrite if not appendable. I've set our overwrite protection period to 5 days and infinitely appendable.

What I want the job to do is start on slot 1 on Monday, then carry over to slot 2 when the tape in slot 1 fills up. Then on Tuesday, pick up where it left off on slot 2, and then go to slot 2, and so on. Is this the way it will work based on how I have it configured?

Right now, I know I have 2 appendable tapes, but they are in slots 5 and 6. So, I figure my Monday job is going to start and fill up those two tapes before it starts to overwrite the tape in slot 1. While I would prefer that it starts in slot 1, I guess I can live with this alternative.

Is there maybe a better way to achieve full backups while spanning tapes in my situtation?

Thanks for any input.