Expire some old data from Tape media.

[zuhaib_siddiqui]

Dear Friends.

I want to expire some of my old data from tape media where my new or latest data has reside and don't want to expire that media except old data.

Please share command from which may I expire that old data.

Please help me in this regards

Regards

Zuhaib Siddiqui

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

It will not help to expire some of the data as NBU cannot overwrite this space. It can only append to the end of the last session on tape or overwrite from the start when all images on tape have expired.

[Nicolai]

Please see this blog 

http://forum.support.veritas.com/connect/blogs/understanding-how-netbackup-writes-tape

Tape is a sequential media not random access media. And as Marianne pointed out, a tape has to be completely expired (e.g no backup on it) before Netbackup will re-use it.

[media1brian]

Video here on how to erase data tape media 100% pin-to-hub in 2 minutes, 4 mintues if the media will be reused again:

(Link removed )

Hope this helped.

[Marianne]

Wrong place to advertise....

[Genericus]

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).