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Grayc's avatar
Grayc
Level 4
9 years ago

Removing Expired Backup Sets That Were Written To Tape

I recently upgraded our media servers (running Windows 2008 R2 OS) from BE2012 to BE15. When I look at the backup sets, I see a long list of expired backup sets where the "Storage" column is ident...
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Backup and Recovery
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Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    9 years ago

    You have a couple of problems here and you should not mix them up.

    1) Unknown storage - These are probably orphaned catalog entries.  If you are sure that the tapes have been overwritten, you can either log a support with Symantec so that the engineer can remove these orphaned entries for you or follow the procedure in this comment.

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/delete-backup-sets-unknown-storage#comment-11127671

    2) You only expire disk backup sets.  The expiry of tape backup sets are controlled by media sets and not DLM.  After the tape backup sets expire, their catalog entries would only be deleted after the tape that they are on are overwritten.

    3) For disk backup sets, after they expire, they would only be deleted in the next DLM grooming cycle which is done every 4 hours.  If you upgrade to FP1, then the grooming cycle is done every hour. For BE 15, you can expire a disk backup set and these would be deleted immediately.

pkh's avatar
pkh
Moderator
9 years ago

You have a couple of problems here and you should not mix them up.

1) Unknown storage - These are probably orphaned catalog entries.  If you are sure that the tapes have been overwritten, you can either log a support with Symantec so that the engineer can remove these orphaned entries for you or follow the procedure in this comment.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/delete-backup-sets-unknown-storage#comment-11127671

2) You only expire disk backup sets.  The expiry of tape backup sets are controlled by media sets and not DLM.  After the tape backup sets expire, their catalog entries would only be deleted after the tape that they are on are overwritten.

3) For disk backup sets, after they expire, they would only be deleted in the next DLM grooming cycle which is done every 4 hours.  If you upgrade to FP1, then the grooming cycle is done every hour. For BE 15, you can expire a disk backup set and these would be deleted immediately.