Expiring the images on VTL

[steve_unix]

Hi Readers/Experts

I have a quick question , I have a Clarion disk library and under that we have a VTL created and we have around 50 tape drives and we have many tapes (Virtual Tapes )in it and a multiple roberts( I mean every thing is virtual) and we did vaulting on Physical Tapes

Now my concern is I want to expire the images on VTL , we have around 50 thousand Images is there any quick way to do it

My netbackup enviorment is 6.0

can anybody help me with this

Regards

[Abesama]

I was halfway writing reply but I wanted to put some mechanism to check on the copy #2 before expiring images, and my laptop lost network - that was yesterday so I'm just revisiting it today.

Yasuhisa, are you sure you'd want to do something like that to your backups in production environment?

That's quite a dangerous combination of command syntaxes, especially with the "-force" option and 2>/dev/null, I think.

I don't want to be someone who does not do any work and criticize on other's work at the same time, but I'd suggest expiring images, not tapes, and do it only after verifying that the copy #2 on the physical tape library does exist.

Abe

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Short script I wrote before is just sample, and expire all the images on specified robot without any intervention.
This sample is dangerous in some sense.
I read "expire the images on VTL" and, I understood Steve want to expire all the images on VTL. It was better to write this sample with notice.

And, I tested this sample in my test environment(NB 6.5.4), and make sure copy 2 on other storage is kept.
"bpexpdate -m media_id" only expires the copy of images on the specified volume.

> That's quite a dangerous combination of command syntaxes, especially with the "-force" option and 2>/dev/null, I think.
Yes, it is better to be careful.
But I added "-force" to avoid any intervention, and "2>/dev/null" to hide "requested media id is not assigned to this host in the EMM database" message. bpexpdate shows this message for unassigned, empty volumes.

[Radhakrishnan]

You can use SLP which  help you to create copy 2 without using vault duplication and also helps to create different retention levels for copy 1 and copy 2. You can perform inline copy for two destinations using SLP and incase one fails , it will be duplicated from  the successful one. There are lot of advantages are there.  You can perform network optimized duplication and hierarchical duplications.

Just be careful with those commands they are pretty much destruct whole system if not provided correctly.

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Here is an short example on Unix.

*** notice: this script expires all the images on specified robot without confirmation ***
# /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmquery -rt robot_type -rn robot_number -l | cut -f1 -d " " | while read m;do /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpexpdate -m $m -d 0 -force 2>/dev/null;done