My company does daily backups and swaps tapes out daily (on Monday night, we only have Monday tapes loaded). Once the tapes are used we send them offsite using a tape pickup/storage/delivery service, and to do that the tapes have to be labeled with barcoded labels. We use multiple libraries for multiple servers that we host. I have recently been asked to fill the empty slots of the libraries with blank spare tapes in the event that there is more data than the daily rotation tapes are able to hold. The first day was a disaster when only the spare tapes were used. I thought I had it fixed when I discovered Settings>Storage>Media overwrite options>Overwrite recyclable media contained in the targeted media set before over writing scratch media.
I had forgotten to take into account that every month, we remove the month end tapes from the rotation and put new tapes into the rotation, thereby making the rotation tapes also seen as scratch tapes, and then BE starts using a mix of rotation and spare tapes. I've read many other posts that say to use partitions, but I don’t think that would work in this case because I still want the job to be able to pull from the spares if needed, which is why they are there in the first place. Is there any way I can control which library slots have priority in Backup Exec without using partitions?