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Question about Image Cleanup Process

Rick_Brown
Level 4

Hello All,

When Image Cleanup runs it's supposed to look at the DB and cleanout images that have expired. After this happens, another process  "bpexpdate -deassignempty" returns tapes without valid images to the scratch pool. This sounds great.

My question is what triggers the bpexpdate -deassignempty" command? If I invoke a manual run of the Image Cleanup process, it doen't automatically start sending "empty" tapes into the scratch pool as soon as it finishes the image cleanup process.

I wouldn't normally stare at this waiting for the grass to grown, but I wanted to know why there was a bunch of tapes which data expiration dates several hours earlier than the time I was checking AND about 30 minutes after a successful image cleanup process had ran. This was perplexing to say the least.
It seems like this command runs when NBU is quiet or as some random interval. Any help in understanding this is appreciated.

Cheers,

Rick

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Will_Restore
Level 6

By default, bpexpdate -deassignempty will run every 12 hours.

 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH125287
 

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3

Will_Restore
Level 6

By default, bpexpdate -deassignempty will run every 12 hours.

 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH125287
 

J_H_Is_gone
Level 6

a clean up does NOT expire images every time it runs.  by default the clean up will only expire images the next time it runs if it has been 12 hours from the last expire run (this is because it can take a while for the expire images step to finish - and you do not want to run a new one if one is already running)  you can change the time on this to run more often - but you will never get it to expire tapes just as they hit there expire times.

Andy_Welburn
Level 6

& further to the answers that you've already received, running a bpimage -cleanup -allclients manually will not instigate the deassign process.

If there are media that you know should be unassigned, there's nothing to stop you from running the bpexpdate -deassignempty command manually also.

e.g.

 # bpexpdate -deassignempty
Search for empty media that meet the following criteria:
        Media id: All

Continue? y/n (n)y
The following empty media will be deassigned:
        Host:blah    Media-id:300351
        Host:blah    Media-id:300894
Are you SURE you want to continue y/n (n)?y
Deassigned media-id 300351 on host blah
Deassigned media-id 300894 on host blah
Deassigned 2 out of 711 media-ids found. 

The following T/N expands slightly, or confirms, what in mentioned in the T/N that Bill quoted - the method used to change the interval at which the deassign command runs:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH63221