1. see above - you gain mostly NOTHING if you do not clear the tape.
2. However, there are several ways to select and expire images without blasting the whole tape.
I would suggest using bpimagelist to find images and bpexpdate to update the expiration date, then " bpexpdate -deassignempty -force" to clear the old images from your catalog.
on my solaris master, I can run this sequence to delete images for several hosts, for 2013.
for i in host1 host2 host3 host4
do
echo $i
bpimagelist -idonly -d '01/01/2013' -e '12/31/2013' -client $i
echo "Changing Backup ID: "$i at `date +%Y%m%d.%H%M`
bpexpdate -m $i -d 0 -force
done
bpimagelist can use policy or schedule as well, so you can get pretty selective.
bpimagelist -idonly -d '01/01/2011' -e '12/31/2014' -client $x -sl Weekly_Full_Backup finds clients in list x, with schedule specified.
If you do not want to zero out (expire ) the images, you can recalculate them to an alternate retention as well,
bpexpdate -recalculate -backupid $i -copy 2 -ret 13 -force recalculates copy 2 to retention 13 for each backupid in list i
EDIT to add - caveat! DANGER DANGER DANGER!
PLEASE TEST the commands to ensure that what you are selecting is what you want. Run them with an echo or to an output file and VERIFY, because once you change the expiration and run the clean up command, you are in for a lot of work to get them back (if you can).
