The data that was being written to the tape when you canceled it is not valid meaning there is no image available for it. So the space on the tape will be overwritten with the next attempt.

The basic answer is yes the job immediately expires and the space is available for new writes.

But sometimes not.  For instance.  If the original job fills a tape, there's a cleanup job that needs to run to find the tape can be unfilled.  That job may not run immediately after the job is cancelled.  And if anything managed to write to a tape after the job (multiplexing would be the easiest way), then the space can't be reused until the other items on the tape expire.

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Darren

Thx guys

We have multiplexing on most policies
70% of the time, the canned jobs are the only last running / overrun, so normally the next job would be some hours later in the next evening wave
But 30% of the time, after canning a job, a new job starts
They appear random, but are triggered by command line after other system batch runs

So, I expect i have a good heap of wasted space on my tapes but not too much to worry greatly about

 My Answer is "NO", As of my knowledge and Experience, It will not expire the images that are written to tapes if job got canceled.

Correct me with exact answer if am wrong !

I posted about this issue awhile back. There seems to be a difference of opinion on this but I have had to manually expire entire tapes that were used soley by the failed backup as Darren Dunham mentioned. As far as partially used tapes go I can run a "Media contents" report and images from the failed job are still on the partially used media. So, if the partially used media has valid images on it you can't reclaim the space used by the failed job. This is my understanding and experience with it. Maybe the answers to my post on the same question wil help.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/how...

expire the image and expire the tape are two different things.

when netbackup goes to use a tape and mounts it, it gets assigned -
assigned means that netbackup too a scratch tape iwth no assigned date and tried to use the tape today - does not mean that it worte to it.

Now when netbackup writes to the tape it gets an images ( this does not change the assigned date).

if the backup is good then the tape has an assigned date, and has a good images.

now say you use the SAME tape tomorrow - the assigned date does NOT change - but the tape does get a new image.  So now you have this (no multiplexing)

BOT|day1image|day2image|blankspace|EOT

now the day1image expires on the tape - the assigned date does not change and you have this.

BOT|expiredimage|day2image|blankspace|EOT

if you try to write to this tape again it will ONLY write in the blankspace as tapes are Linier - meaning they can only append (tapes cannot wirte here and there like a disk can)

Now day2image expires - the assigned date of the tape goes blank - no assigned date

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Now look at it with multiplexing.

you use the tape - it gets an assigned date.

BOT|server1part1|server2part1|server1part2|server2part2|blankspace

if the backup for server1 fails or if the backup image expires then you have this

BOT|expiredimage|server2part1|expiredimage|server2part2|blankspace

remember tape is lienier it cannot go back and write in those spaces where the failed image whent.

so you do lose space on a tape when a backup failes or expires.

a tape will stay assigned until all images on the tape have expired.
so if you want the tape to be unassigned, you need to expire all the images on it.

I found tape with mutiplexing backup images always give me some headaches, just as J.Hinchcliffe pointed out, that you cannot reuse/reclaim the tape capacity occupied by the expired images because not all image fragments on the same tape have expired.

Yes I know the benefit with mutiplexing - you get several slow backup jobs into one streamline tape write process.  However there is a tradeoff.  Restore performance is bad.

That's why I prefer backup to disk first, and duplicate to tape (B2D2T).

Whenever you have a chance, try back up to disk or VTL first - you can keep short retention of them to save disk space, and duplicate them to tape with the long retention as your company requires.  The duplicated backup images (on tape) are not multiplexed, so the restore performance is much better.