Erased corrupt BEDB, re-inventorying media, allocation dates are wrong

[Dale_Mahalko]

This post is for the aftermath, following the BE 2010 database corruption and basically wiping it and starting over setting up the media server.

As I re-inventory the tape media it is listed with an allocation date that is when I am scanning it right now, NOT when the tapes were previously used for backup jobs.

This means that the tapes are going to be selected for overwriting by BE, using the arbitrary date of when I did the inventory scan, and not based on what tapes actually have the oldest backup jobs. This is bad because I had a tape pool of four tapes backing up on Fridays only and I want to preserve the tapes in order for the last four fridays.

The odd bit is that if I select a tape and choose "restore data", it shows the original data sets and allocation date/time for each data set. So it somehow knows the allocation date is wrong, but won't let me edit it directly.

Is there a way to edit the allocation dates?

[pkh · Accepted solution]

Not there is no way to change the allocation date.  The allocation date will change when the tape is written to.

What you can do is to manually move the tapes to the scratch media set if you want to overwrite them immediately.

Your problem will clear up after you have cycled through your tapes.