moving tape content to another / replacing tape

[gkman]

Hello,

I have a frozen tape which I want to delete from the system (Its an old tape with small capacity, so I am not even going to confirm that it is really faulting)

I searched what is the correct way to delete the tape, but I am a little unclear of the terminology.

Does expiring a tape meaning expiring and deleting the backups stored on it or does it mean moving the data on the old tape to an empty tape (keeping the backups) and then deleting the old tape? is it possible to choose between the two options?

thanks for the help.

[quebek]

Hi

As far as my knowlege goes I believe that bpexpdate -m xxxxxx -d 0 -force will expire everysingle image which do reside on this tape as well the ones which are spanning other tapes too... So you can do either way; do like above - or get a list of backup images on this tape (bpimmedia -mediaid xxxxxx -U |grep ^Backup-ID) and then expire backup image by backup image....

[Marianne]

bpexpdate will just remove all references to backup images associated with this tape from NBU catalogs.

Nothing is done to the tape itself. Not copied, duplicated or wiped.

If you think the media is still readable, you can try to duplicate it (bpduplicate or Catalog section of the GUI), then expire images.

If you want to wipe/erase the tape, you can try a 'Quick Format' after expiring the images. 

[Genericus]

Executive summary: If you want to keep the data from the tape - DO NOT EXPIRE THE BACKUPS or THE TAPE before making a copy.

To keep the data, you need to use bpduplicate to make another copy somewhere first.

Once you have multiple copies, then you can expire the images on the tape.

How soon will the data expire? If it expires soon, then just let it expire and destroy the tape once it is clear.

Another way of thinking about it, is backup images - forget the tape. You need to clear the images off the tape, that clears the tape.

For example, in my case I backup to disk for 4 weeks ( copy 1 ) then SLP duplicate to tape 8 weeks ( copy 2 ). If I need a longer retention, like a monthly backup kept for a year, I copy again and make copy 3.

If I wanted to clear a tape, if I still had copy 1, I could expire copy 2, then re-duplicate another one.

If copy 1 had expired, I would only have copy 2 on tape. I would bpduplicate copy 2 to disk, (creating a new copy 1 ) , then expire copy 2, and duplicate from disk again.

A confusing thing is that in the catalog, it will always build copy # using the first blank number - so if copy 1 had expired, the new copy will be 1, even if you are copying from a higher number.