Reusing media

[lhr3w]

hi,

I want to expire some backup images with infinity retention and want to reuse media. what do i have to do?

I am running NBU6.0 // Windows 2003 // 

Regards,

[Andy_Welburn]

in question have ABSOLUTELY NO IMAGES ON THEM THAT YOU REQUIRE then you could look at using the bpexpdate command on those media.

e.g. bpexpdate -d 0 -m <media_id>

If you're not 100% sure what the media contains then you'd best not just expire the media as you could inadvertantly lose backup images that you don't intend. But you could use the same command to expire those infinite retention images individually - but if the media involved have other images on that you haven't expired & that media is FULL it will remain FULL.

Once the media is no longer assigned (no valid images) you should then be able to re-assign it to your Scratch (or other) volume pool for re-use.

[lhr3w]

yes i am sure about media. 

now do i need to unassign media and also how to change their to volume pool to scratch

[JHeaton]

So you have to do this through a CLI?  There's no way of doing this from within the Console?  Is this changed for Version 7?

[Marianne]

If media was originally in the Scratch pool, they will be returned to Scratch once expired.

Admin Guide I says the following about Scratch pool:

"A scratch pool is a special volume pool from which NetBackup can transfer volumes to another volume pool when that pool has no volumes available. When the images on a volume expire, NetBackup returns it to the scratch volume pool if it was assigned from the scratch pool."

[Moeman]

That's what the Admin Guide says but don't be fooled.  The majority of my tapes never expire on the date they are supposed to and return to the scratch pool.  I have to manually expire them using the bpexpdate command.  I have found no way to do this using the GUI.

[Andy_Welburn]

but you may want to search for "deassignempty" within the knowledgebase - there can be issues where the nbpem scheduled job "bpexpdate -deassignempty" does not run which could be the reason why your tapes are not expiring "naturally"

e.g.

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

bpexpdate -deassignempty is not running.
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH125287

DOCUMENTATION: How to manually identify and remove zero-byte or corrupt image header files which are preventing empty tapes from being returned to scratch and are preventing the "bpexpdate -deassignempty" command from completing successfully.
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH60787

to name but a few!!

[Andy_Welburn]

In answer to your later question below: once expired, if the media don't automatically move to scratch pool (depends on where they were previously - see Mariannes post) then you can use the GUI to <right-click> & change the media to their new volume pool.

[lhr3w]

i have expired backups uding

bpexpdate -m <media id> -d 0 -force

now all the media are in standalone state

i want to move them to scratch pool, but getting error 91

i am also unable to bpexpdate -deassignempty, it gives me some error of host list.

any solution.

[Marianne]

Standalone simply means the tapes are not in the robot. What is in the 'Assign Time' field for these tapes?

Do you perhaps have media server(s) that was removed without proper decommisioning?

'bpexpdate -deassignempty' will log in 'admin' log on the master. Please check this log to see which host name/server cannot be contacted.

Please post output of the following for one of the media-id's:

<install-path>\veritas\netbackup\bin\admincmd\nbemmcmd -listmedia -mediaid <media-id>

[lhr3w]

yes tapes are not in library - if i put them into robot, what would be the status of these. are these will move to scratch?

there are different assign dates on different tapes.

[Marianne]

"there are different assign dates on different tapes."

This means that the media did not expire and deassign successfully.  Putting them in the robot will make no difference whatsoever.

Check admin log for info/errors after running 'bpexpdate -deassignempty'.

I suspect you might be experiencing the scenario described in http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH44800 (although you are getting different error messages).

PLEASE post output of nbemmcmd command. I'd like to see if output looks similar to this section in above TN:

Windows: <Install_dir>\NetBackup\bin\admincmd

Command syntax example and output:

nbemmcmd -listmedia -mediaid A00001

NBEMMCMD, Version:6.0(20050906)

=====================================================

Media GUID:      a5ea9a7a-8d50-13f4-8018-cef85f775cf7

Media ID:        A00001

Partner:         -

Media Type:      HCART

..

Barcode:         A00001

Partner Barcode: --------

Media Server:    NONE

Created:         04/27/2005 16:20

Time Assigned:   05/04/2005 04:20

.. .. ..

=====================================================

Command completed successfully.