How to make tapes rewritable

[NHL]

Hi

Netbackup 6.5 on Red Hat linux 5.2

I created a new volume pool yesterday and assigned 4 tapes to the pool.
I then created a policy and used this pool.

All good. However I want to reuse these tapes again tonight. I don't care about the data on the tapes as it was a test backup to get timings. 

How do I make it so that netbackup will use these tapes again tonight ?
Do I need to  search for the backup  id in the catalog and expire it ? Will that then make those tapes writeable again straight away ?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks
Nick.

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

bpexpdate -force -d 0 -m media_id

for the tapes you wish to use. This will expire ALL images on the selected tape, so only do it if you're sure!

***EDIT***
Having said that, all being equal, your policy will append to the tape anyway without any action. It would just mean that you've lost a little space due to your test saves.

Expiring of the images on the tape would also work as you suggest.

Just check after expiration that the tapes are still in your volume pool & haven't been moved to your scratch pool.

[NHL]

 Hi Andy

brilliant, thanks for the help.

I can see from the GUI that now the tapes in the pool have 0 Kb on them and are marked as active (they were full), so it all looks good.
The tapes that were used last night still have a "Data Expiration" of 1/14/2011 ie one year from yesterday. 

I am confused by what exactly Data Expiration means. It doesn't mean the tape cannot be written to again until 1/14/2011 does it ?

Thanks again,
Nick.

[Andy_Welburn]

& the Data Expiration column is now blank (altho' my tape was also moved into scratch).

Essentially the data expiration date should only be there if there are valid images/data on the tape.

Can you see whether the tape is still assigned? It may be that they need de-assigning? This is normally done automatically by NB & I thought that the bpexpdate command would've done it also (it did for me!)

Try:

bpexpdate -deassignempty

this:

"Expires the removable media from the media catalog when  that media no longer contains valid backups. It also deassigns the media ID in the MediaManager catalog."

[NHL]

 I think you've sorted it out for me.

I originally expired the images via the GUi, ie expire in the catalog search.

I just ran the bpexpdate command you gave and that has also removed the Data Expiration value.

I reckon this is sorted now.

Thanks very much for your help Andy, it's appreciated.

Nick.

[J_H_Is_gone]

Please mark Andys post as a solution and give him credit for it.