Expire images from tape of a policy (retention infinity)

Hi,

You could potentially "expire" only the images of one "policy", which is actually a backup image. The poroblem is this expiry is only going to expire (remove) the images from your catalog. NetBackup is not going to use that tape again unless all the images have expired, or if there is space at the end of the tape (and you're performing a backup of the same retention, or if you are mixing retention on the tape).

Think about it this way, say you write 5x blocks to a tape, then 4x, then 6x. So now you want to expire the images that is 4x. NetBacup will not use the tape because it now has to find an images that will fit in the 4x gap you created before the 6x image. Thats just too complicated.

You should expire all the images or none of them. Alternatively if you really want to complicate it, you can expire the ones you don't need, them duplicate the ones you want to keep to new media, and then expire the old media completely. Which would then give you free tapes (but you would have used more tapes for the duplication).

R

use bpexpdate command to expire the images. You can expire the only the images or all the images on a tapes.

bpexpdate -backupid client_XXXXXXXXX -d 0

bpexpdate -m MEDIA_ID -d 0

Thanks for the responses(and quickly, too!). All of my policies have a retention of infinity(these are one time backups, and the source filesystems are readonly). So, in my example, one policy spans about 15 tapes, and there is only a slight chance that there may be an image from another policy on those tapes in question. So, if only one of those tapes has an image from a policy I want to remove, would the other 14 be immediately available to be written to?

Also, if I use bpexpdate, would I need to have the tapes in question in my library?

You can only write to tapes again if ALL images on these tapes have expired. If you just expire certain images, the space can not be re-used.

This blog explains it nicely:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/understanding-how-netbackup-writes-tape

So, I have media IDs 000400-000414. They only contain images of the policy I want to remove. So I can just do a:

bpexpdate -m 000400 -d 0

bpexpdate -m 000401 -d 0

etc..correct? Do I need to have these tapes in the library when I perform the bpexpdate? Or can I run the bpexpdate now, and then when I add the tapes back into the library netbackup in the next few days, netbackup will apply the changes?

So, I have media IDs 000400-000414. They only contain images of the policy I want to remove. So I can just do a:

bpexpdate -m 000400 -d 0

bpexpdate -m 000401 -d 0

etc..correct? Do I need to have these tapes in the library when I perform the bpexpdate? Or can I run the bpexpdate now, and then when I add the tapes back into the library netbackup in the next few days, netbackup will apply the changes?

You dont have to need them in library. when you expire a tape it just means that you are updating the Database and whenever the tape is inserted immediately it is recognised as scratch tape after the inventory.

Dont use bpexpdate -m, it will expire all the images on the tape, use -backupid. Unless you're sure that the tapes only contain the images of the backup image you want to expire.

Refer to my post above.

You have all been a great help. I am expiring my images of the policy from the gui(catalog -> search via policy name, and expiring), and then will see what, if anything, still resides on the tapes and I will handle from there. Thank you all.