Bulk Expiration of Tapes

[Chad_Wansing]

Hello all. While working through some compliance stuff last week I came across a period of time where our organization was obviously keeping everything with an indefinite retention and was tasked by my manager with ensuring anything we have complied with our current retention schedule..........so I wound up with the dubious privledge of having to manually expire approximately 300 tapes across a couple different master servers. Below is the text of a vbscript I wrote that I hope some of you other NBU on Windows admins may be able to make use of. I sort the total media for whatever site I'm working within by its "Time Assigned" field, Ctrl-C that info into an Excel spreadsheet and then just copy the column containing the media ID's into a .txt file I called "OldTapeList.txt". Then I run my script file which reads from the tape list, performs bpexpdate -d 0 -m -force (to supress the y/n prompt) in parallel for every tape listed. You'll have to change the script for your specific location of where you locate your tape list.

This was actually my first ever VBscript, and I hope you all can get some use out of it. I learned a ton writing it. I actually hope to have its powershell conversion done sometime next week (when I get some time).

Please feel free to contact me via cwansing@ikon.com (e-mail or IM) with any suggestions or concerns. Use it at your own risk, but it has worked fine for me for over 200 tapes now.



Const ForReading = 1

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set SOURCE = objFSO.OpenTextFile("E:\Program Files\VERITAS\NetBackup\bin\admincmd\OldTapeList.txt", ForReading)
Dim EXPIRE
EXPIRE = "bpexpdate -d 0 -m"

Do Until SOURCE.AtEndOfStream
TAPE = SOURCE.ReadLine
WshShell.Run""+EXPIRE+" "+TAPE+" -force"
Loop

SOURCE.Close

[Alex_Vasquez]

Chad,
This is a nice script. Couldn't this be done with a simpler batch file? You would first need a text file with the media that you wish to expire. Secondly you write the script to run the bpexpdate command for those items contained within the file. I think that's correct. Anyway, I like your script though... I may just play with it.

[Chad_Wansing]

I actually started out doing it as a batch file, but couldn't find ANY info on how to do a "Do Until" loop. There just seemed to be more information out there supporting the VB Script side. And you're absolutely correct, you do need a seperate file to read the tape ID's out of. I figured that would be less of a hassle than trying to set up some kind of array or something. As you can see in my example above, I've just put the media ID's into a text file called "OldTapeList.txt". I extract the media ID's by copying all the tape info for the tapes I wish to expire into an Excel spreadsheet (control-C will copy all the data out of your media listings) and then copy/cut just the media ID field out of the spreadsheet into my media list. Double-click the script, it'll open up a cmd prompt window for every tape listed, runs the expires in parallel, and are usually all finished in about 8 seconds or so.

The best part is NO INTERACTION once you get the media ID's fed in. The -force option is used with the bpexpdate command for just this reason.

Another thing of note, I copied this file and just changed the command it's running to a "bpmedia -unfreeze -m", and now I have an automatic unfreezing script, I just have to input my tape ID's to the same file I was using before......or make a second list file called "UnfreezeTapeList.txt" or something, change that line in the script, and you're ready to go.