Not an easy one this - have been thinking about it and maybe the answer just needs a little planning.
One thing I did want to say is that changing the date in the GUI changed the expiry date of the volume (when it will never be used again by NetBackup, not the date of the images on it - so dont do that!)
Get your list of tape involved viweable in the GUI and make sure you have shown the Last Written and Media Owner in the columns.
Highlight them all and CTL-C then paste into excel
Sort by media owner and split them onto tabs for each media server.
Sort these by last written so that you can group them together into sets of dates and work out when you actually want them to expire.
Then just use bpexpdate -m ABC123 -d 05/23/2012 23:59:59 -host mediaservername
(This date and time just being an example)
If you put each set of tapes for each media server into a text file, named server1.txt, server2.txt etc then you could run a script such as:
for /f %%a in (server1.txt) do bpexpdate -m %%a -d 05/23/2012 23:59:59 -host server1 -force
Do this for each date set, changing the date for each set.
Once they are all done run:
bpimage -cleanup -allclients
To do an image cleanup followed by:
bpexpdate -deassignempty -force
To clean down all of your tapes.
Dont know if this will help - guess it depends how many different date sets you have involved.
If you are using media sharing groups you probably wont need the -host bit so could put all tapes for one date into a single file.
