Scheduling ATL Drive cleaning in Net Backup

[Bluesea]

Hi

Does anybody have a BKM to schedule ATL tape drive (SDLT600/320) cleaning from NetBackup?

Thanks

[Abesama]

From the tape drive/library vendor support document, you can find out if the tape drive supports Tape Alert feature or not.

If it does, then put cleaning tapes in library, and assign them CLN type.

For example, if your tape drives are configured as DLT3, then all your tapes will be of DLT3 type too - in this case, you make your cleaning tapes be of DLT3_CLN type.

When you do volume inventory update, you can specify the media type according to the barcode label - so it is a good idea to label those cleaning tapes with CLN prefixed barcode labels, so that you can set up the barcode rule in the volume inventory option, to make all the CLNxxx tapes to be of DLT3_CLN type.

By DLT3, I do not mean the physical DLT4000/DLT8000/SDLT types - I mean the drive type and the media type within the NetBackup device/volume database (EMM, if it's 6.x), that's what NetBackup cares about.

Cheers,

Abe

[Deepak_W]

@ abesama
you covered it all

@bluesea
check post and mark as solution if your query is answered

also you can make autocleaning from your TL by defining cleaning slot and enabling autoclean option

  

[LeeClayton]

I've read that using autoclean from the tape library can cause backups to fail. We get the odd error on our tape library, asking for a clean, but we've configured netbackup to clean every 250 hours of use, this seems to do the trick but just annoying getting the errors from the tape library, not that often.

[Stumpr2]

I prefer manually cleaning tape drives.
The autoclean triggers on drive errors that might not be the fault of a dirty head.