Change retention period on backup

[USBCSupport]

I am running Netbackup 7.1 on a Windows 2008 R2 machine. I reused an old VMware backup policy to take some full and (I thought) permanent backups of some old VMs. I loaded several new tapes and added them to the Special media volume pool that has an infinite retention. However, the backup policy itself has a 2 week retention, and I didn't notice that before backing all of those old VMs to these new tapes.

Rather than re-run all the backups with a new policy that is set for infinite retention, I wondered if it was possible to just change the retention of the images themselves after the fact? The tapes I used were for those permanent backups only, and I'll be removing them from the rotation, so there's no chance that there will be a mix of retention on the same tape.

If changing the retention of the images is not necessary if the tapes themselves have no expiration, I need to know that for sure. And if there's a way to do this with the admin console rather than by command-line, that would make me happy (as I have little enough experience with NetBackup as it is).

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[J_H_Is_gone · Accepted solution]

sorry you need to do it at command line

bpexpdate -m <mediaid>  -d infinity

this would Chang the expiration date of all the images on the media id given to infinity

the tapes do not need an expiration date if the images have infinity or not ( that is just if you want to stop using a tape after it reach a certain age)

[USBCSupport]

This is ignorance on my part....but where am I entering these commands? I'm assuming at a Windows command prompt, but should they be run from a specific folder?

[revarooo]

If you do not have the NetBackup commands added to your PATH then run from a 'cmd' prompt as an administrator

C:\Program Files\Veritas\netbackup\bin\admincmd\

Then run the bpexpdate command 

[USBCSupport]

So if after running the bpexpdate command I log into the GUI and the "Images on Tape" report still shows the retention period as 2 weeks.....am I being too impatient, or did it not change the retention?

[USBCSupport]

Thanks....of course our installation is non-standard and it was installed on a different drive.... finally figured it out.

[Andy_Welburn]

Does the actual data expiration still reflect 2 weeks?

[USBCSupport]

Interesting....the expiration date DID change to 1/18/2038; wonder why the Retention Period isn't infinity? But I feel better about it now. I'm considering this problem solved at this point. Thanks for the help.

[Andy_Welburn]

altho' not sure whether it would've had the 'cosmetic' effect you were expecting (& where) without trying it

i.e. bpexpdate -recalculate -backupid backup_id -ret retention-level

But you're sorted now so one to think of for the future!