What are the retentions on the 5020 appliances?
Is it not possible to just leave the old appliances until all images naturally expire?
The longest retention is 12 months and leaving them to expire would not be a problem if the 5020 were still in support by Veritas.
These went out of support long ago and we don't want to be at risk of losing our data if they break down and can't be fixed.
Another approach could be to use bpimagelist to extract list of images with expiry dates and sort them by expiry date.
Split the images by expiry month. Start with images that expire in 11 - 12 months.
Split the images into separate text files (maybe 20 - 50, depending on image size and amount of images).
Use -Bidfile option to kick of multiple bpduplicate commands.
See how it goes and maybe adjust the number of images per input file and decide if number of bpduplicate commands can be increased or should be decreased.
Images with short retentions and immenent expiration dates will start to expire while you work your way down the expiration dates.
PS:
Remember to keep a copy of the text files in a different folder - the moment NBU reads the contents of the Bidfile as input to bpduplicate, the text file is deleted!
It appears one cannot run multiple copy duplications ( "-copies 2" ) to an appliance, but certainly to PTL.
So I had to perform a manual duplication twice of the same image(s), a single copy at a time because we keep 2 copies of data - onsite and offsite.
