how to get rid of non-valid images manually

[kaush]

Hi All,

I've discovered that some of my tapes consist of only a couple of small valid images, the rest are non-valid, yet the tape is marked by Netbackup as 'full'.

Is there a way to manually delete the non-valid images, to free up more room?

This is just an interim measure until we receive more storage - however in the meantime, i'm seriously running out of room!

tia.

[Andy_Welburn]

You could duplicate all (?) those 'valid' images to another tape & once done expire the original tape (as long as you are sure none of the images on that tape are images or fragments thereof that you do require)

***Edit***

Obviously  you would need more 'storage' in the first instance to do this!

[kaush]

i've run out of space on all tapes for a certain Volume Pool & retention level. There are 4 200gb tapes in the pool for that RL, and all are showing in the NB GUI as full.

When I queried on of the tapes in Netbackup, it was confirmed as full,  and it contained 3 valid images & 61 non valid images? A bpimmmedia on that tape, shows only 3 images totalling less than 20GB.

Is there a way to delete the non-valid images, so netbackup reports the true available space?

[Andy_Welburn]

that NetBackup ONLY appends to tape, so even if you managed to expire any images you probably won't 'free up' any space on your tapes.

Have you any other tapes in other volume pools going spare i.e. of the correct density, unassigned, etc, that you could move to this volume pool

[rj_nbu · Accepted solution]

Suppose, there are 100 images on a tape (which shows up as FULL) , and out of that 5 are valid (read available) ,as is your case;  this does not mean that the rest 95 are invalid  The terminology for this is called expired images.

Now, I'm not sure how other backup softwares treat the tapes in this condition, but netbackup will consider a tape as available when all the images on the tape have expired. Until then, Netbackup will not rewind the tape and write backups in the 'empty' space.

Netbackup will utilize the tape (mark that tape as available) only when all the images on the tape have expired, and there is no way (that I am aware of) to force netbackup to write backups from the beginning of the tape if the tape contains unexpired images in the end

This is why you would see that a tape is mounted and 'positioned to file # ' before bptm starts writing data.


Makes Sense?

[Deepak_W]

That is why it is not recommended to have different backups jobs having different retention levels going on the same media....

This is why till the time last image on the media is not expired, media is not usable for NBU.

[kaush]

yep that makes perfect sense :) many thanks for your help.