How to expire Images from Tape

[Tom_Henneker]

In my case, I've found that if I try to duplicate and don't have available media, the tape is permanently marked as Full, whereas if I'm doing a backup and don't have available media the tape is temporarily marked full until an image cleanup.  Is it possible to delete the invalid partial image on the tape created by the failed duplication?

[Marianne]

I have moved this to a new post from
https://vox.veritas.com/t5/NetBackup/How-to-expire-Images-from-Tape/td-p/825323
since this issue is not directly related to the previous post.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

If the tape is in FULL state and you want to use it again you need to wait for _all_ images expiration (or expire them manually). After that the tape would switch into AVAILABLE state again. You can't expire one image and write something in that area.

[Marianne]

It simply seems that you do not have sufficient tapes to meet duplication needs.
The NBU cleanup fuction works the same for backup and duplication process.

Trying to fix it by removing failed pieces of a multiplexed tape is not going to work. Unless you choose to demultiplex duplications. Then only the very last image duplication will fail and should be discarded at the next cleanup cycle.

Use the tame wasted with failed duplications due to insufficient media as motivation to purchase more media.

[Tom_Henneker]

You say it works the same way for backups and duplications, but that is not what I'm seeing.  I guess that's my point.  You said,

"Unless you choose to demultiplex duplications. Then only the very last image duplication will fail and should be discarded at the next cleanup cycle." 

But the tape is not multiplexed, and the very last image is not being discarded in the cleanup cycle.  In the tape reports, I see the failed image in the list of "tape contents" report, but it doesn't show in the "images on tape" report or when searching the catalog.  Since the cleanup cycle is not removing that final invalid image on the tape, I'm wondering if there is a command line option I can use to manually remove it?

I will be sure to be more careful in the future to make sure that the new media I add is set as "Scratch" media..    :)

[mph999]

The way to check to see if there is an image or or not in the catalog, is bpimagelist - which effectively you have done when searcing the catalog if you used the GUI.

If the image isn't showing in bpimagelist/ GUI, I think it's safe to say it has gone ...

The next thing I would check, for the media in question, is bpmedialist -m <media ID> and see haw many valid images are shown (shoud be 0 in theory) and what the status the tape is showing as.

[Tom_Henneker]

bpmedialist shows images = 6 and vimages = 5. 

So it looks like the invalid image at the end of the tape is still there.  I suppose I could expire all of the images on the tape and re-duplicate them all, but I think the first image on the tape was spanned over from a previous tape, so will I create an invalid image on that tape by doing so?  I guess the tape vendors benefit by me not being able to use the 800GB that is unrecoverable at the end of the tape when I make a careless mistake like this....