Blank media but has assign time.

[Vickie]

Hi All,

One thing I need your help in is, 

I want to know the Tape get assign time but does not contains any data “0 kb”. How can I recognize such tapes ?

Question in detail:

1. Tape Media get assign time.

2. But nothing has been written on the tape media. No data is there on tape.

3. How can I get the list of such media? 

May be "bpmedialist" command help here, but not sure.

Suggestion and help is much appreciable.

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

This is a flagrant 'cut' of one of my posts about 3 years ago:

If there are media that you know should be unassigned, there's nothing to stop you from running the bpexpdate -deassignempty command manually also.

e.g.

 # bpexpdate -deassignempty
Search for empty media that meet the following criteria:
        Media id: All

Continue? y/n (n)y
The following empty media will be deassigned:
        Host:blah    Media-id:300351
        Host:blah    Media-id:300894
Are you SURE you want to continue y/n (n)?y
Deassigned media-id 300351 on host blah
Deassigned media-id 300894 on host blah
Deassigned 2 out of 711 media-ids found. 

The following T/N expands slightly, or confirms, what in mentioned in the T/N that Bill quoted - the method used to change the interval at which the deassign command runs:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?pag...

So, bpexpdate -deassignempty should identify these media, but there are probably a few reports or even the GUI may assist.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH135182

The purpose of the bpexpdate -deassignempty command is to return a tape to scratch if all of the images on the tape have expired before the tape's expiration time has been reached - this is to safeguard against the situation where a backup with a long retention period writes data to a tape, but the backup fails - or when all of the backups on a tape have been manually expired by the administator before the tape's expiration time.

I presume my post from the other week prompted this question?

[Vickie]

Yup Andy, your are correct.

I ran NBCC and in the logs get the error for such media.

I tried to find list of media causing the issue, but no luck.

Used command bpmedialist -U, but it gives number of media with 0kb data. And its tough to determine the one to be expire.

Finally, I suppose to get support here.

As usual,from here I got the good understanding of the thing and resolution.

Thanks Andy