Thanx to all that reacted, I think I'll be going for a simple ALTPROC JOB=#J!HPJOBNAME;PRI=152 (C-queue lies between 152 and 200) from within the backup job itself, so that the backup job takes everythin' it needs from CPU. I can leave queue definition alone (using E-queue for backupjob by overlapping queue range with the C-queue (i.e. c=152-200 and e=175-220). I do it this way since we don't have operators available to do it during backup time; there's no interactive possibility. Seems like a nice solution. Only thing I'm still wondering about is, does the PRI=152 eventually decay or not within the queue... is it really fixed? bArtoque