How to know how many times a cleaning media has been used?

[thiagoscorrea]

Hello everyone. Good afternoon.

How to know how many times a cleaning media has been used?

It's just that when I joined the company the tapes were already here. At Netbackup, I have 50 remaining cleanings.

But I do not know if this information is only on the basis of the NBU or if it is the real condition of the media
NBU version 7.0

[X2 · Accepted solution]

Under normal circumstances cleaning cartidges are good for 50 cleanings.

As the GUI tells you (or use command /usr/open/volmgr/bin/vmquery -m <media_id>), the 50 cleanings means that the tapes have not been used yet. Some details in this old discussion might help.

I'm not sure if the tape has some meta data which is updated by the drive as it is used. What I do know is that for manual cleanings, it is recommended to keep a note of number of cleanings and stop after the limit (vendor specified) is reached. In our environment, we just let NetBackup handle the cleaning automatically.

[thiagoscorrea]

tanks for you help

[mph999]

LTO / similiar formats contain a RF chip inside the cartridge.  This tracks quite a few things, including, in the case of a cleaning tape, the number of cleanings left.

I don't think we use this information, although we do read at least some data from the chip - for example if you look in the bptm log for a backup, you will see we list the tape manufacturer for example, this comes off the chip.

The number of cleanings left (from the chip) does prevent the drive from using the tape once it has run out, though this is purely down to the drive, not any backup software.  NBU will decrease the number of cleanings as the tape is used, from whatever starting value is set.  The library, if it controls the cleaning does similar.

Depending of the make of the drives depends on how many cleaning cycles you get off a tape - it's between 40 and 50 usually, though it varies a bit due to the different manufacturers using slightly different cleaning cycle lengths.