Netbackup 6.5.6 Windows

[emd0039]

I'm having issues with tapes having assigned dates over my retention policy.  If I look at the image dates upon the media it shows that the media images have expired.  Netbackup will not use the tape and I have to bpexpdate the media. Once I do that the media is fine.  Netbackup Enterprise 6.5.6 on a Windows 2003 Enterprise SP2 edition.

[J_H_Is_gone]

1) are the tapes frozen - this will cause it not to use the tape

2) just how far past the expiration date of the images are they?

Note:  when an image reaches it expiration date/time it is now ELIGIBLE to be expired come NEXT round of expiration's.   NB will only expire tapes once the Image Cleanup time has been reached.  So if your image expires at 8:02 am  (and your image clean up is set to 12 hours) it will get expired sometime before 8:02 pm ( that would be the max time)  - as  within a 12 hour period the image cleanup should run.   but a tape NEVER gets cleaned up at exactly the time listed as the expiration date and time.

Reason is NB does not want to start a new run of expirations if the last run is still walking through all the images looking for what needs to be expired.  so by default it is set to 12 hour intervals to expire tapes.

[emd0039]

The tapes are not frozen.  The last batch of tapes showed that the images had expired back in late June/ middle of July time frame.  My retention cycle is 2 and 4 weeks.   The tapes generally will be over the 2 or 4 week retention.  Looking at the dates we're well over that retention period. 

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

You could run the bpexpdate -deassignempty command to see if this unassigns your expired media

The following T/N may apply:

The bpexpdate -deassignempty command is not being run automatically by the scheduler, and empty tapes, which hold no valid images, are not being made available for backups
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH135182

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[emd0039]

Andy,

Thanks that hit the nail on the head.  That was my problem.

Michael

[Marianne]

I have moved the Solution to Andy's post.