How to truncate the tapes in order to reduce the tape size to less than 400GB?
This issue has been solved. See solution.
Yongkang
April 26th, 2009
For some reason, the tape (VTL) size is more than 400GB, then the clone to physical tape always failed with Physical end-of tape.
I already did the following actions.
1. I duplicated the last 10 images.
2. I expired the last 10 images by bpexpdate.
3. I deleted the copy 1 by bpimage.
After the action 1, 2 and 3, NetBackup still thought the tape is full and the occupied size is still more than 400GB. Any other actions need to be done in order to let NetBackup know the tape is not full and available to append backups?
How to force NetBackup to overwrite the last few images?
As a matter of fact, the last few images already expired. But from NetBackup point of view, the tape is still FULL since some other images are not expired. I was wondering if there's any ways to force overwrite the last expired images? Thanks in advance.
Expiration
The Tape will expire, when all of the images are expired - so what you tried will not work.
But to solve your problem:
I guess your physical tapes are attached directly to the VTL. The VTL doesn't know which area of the virtual tape contains NetBackup-expired Data, it just knows, that you've written 400 GB onto the tape. VTL compression is "better" than the compression on most tape drives, so the tape full condition have will happen, when compression is enabled and you use the full physical tape capacity as the capacity of the virtual tapes. The recommendation we got is to lower the size of the virtual tapes by 10%, so the virtual tape will fit on the physical tape. This will make the clone work, but you might need more physical media than you would need without a VTL.
Thanks for your reply. The
Thanks for your reply. The issues already resolved by VTL vendor with a firmware upgrade. But for the existing virtual tapes which over 400GB, I have to find a way to deal with it. Or I have to duplicate all the images and expire the whole tape.
Duplicate
yes, duplicating the old tapes to new ones will resolve this. You can select all the images on the tape and NetBackup will take care of the distribution to multiple (smaller) tapes.
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