Immediate Expiration of DSSU Images

[Jonathan_Martin]

Is it possible to configure a certain DSSU to remove images from the disk drive as soon as they are destaged to tape? I'm planning backups and capacities and in many cases, there is little or no benefit to having data sit on DSSUs for potential restore. I'd rather have (for example) DSSU1's data expire in an oldest backup first manner once High Water is reached, but in DSSU2 I'd prefer the data gets purged immediately. Ideas?

Thanks,

-Jonathan

[Alex_Vasquez]

Jonathan,
I don't believe Netbackup, at least in 5.x, will allow for a specific retention period for your Disk Staged images. As I understand it to be, the images will stay on disk until your disk staging unit runs out of space. At that time netbackup expires the images beginning with the oldest images first. Of course, you could schedule a script that would do the expiration for you manually... You would need to make use of the bpexpdate command, however.

$ 0.02

[Stumpr2]

yes, I have been doing it for some time.

I get a listing of files that end with .ds and run bpexpdate

bpexpdate -d 0 -force -copy 1 -backupid clientname_1234567891

The copy 1 is necessary so that you only expire the image on the disk. The image that is on tape will automatically become the primary copy to be used for restores.

[Jonathan_Martin]

Thanks all, I wrote a perl script yesterday to parse the directory for image files and expire anything with copies >=2.

[Stumpr2]

yep,
expiration is the way to do it. Glad to have been a help even if it was to simply tell you yes, your on the right track..