you can try the below command.It cleans up expired images.

bpimage -cleanup -allclients

-cleanup 

Man Page
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http://alcor.concordia.ca/manpages/loc1/bpimage.1....

Tapes can only be overwritten when ALL images on the tape have expired.
Use Media Summary report (tick Verbose) to see which tapes will expire in the next day or two and expire the media-id.

bpexpdate -m <media-id> -d 0

Please try and use this situation as motivation to buy more tapes. Expiring tapes/images is never a good idea - retention periods are required by business and backups/tapes need to be available for restore requests until they expire naturally.

Hi,

Marianne van den Berg 2 has the right answer for your situation,

its better you request the scratch tapes from offiste location if you have any before expiring images on full medias,

just to add to my  above post. the same can be done from gui.

Master Server-> Host Properties -> Clean up -> 

I gave Marianne a vote for her response as well.  Most of our original retention periods were determined by a manager's unwillingness to buy tapes - he would buy more storage but not tapes necessary to back that storage up.  He said we could afford to buy a large and expensive tape library but not media.  He hid the true costs of the backups from his management.  Expiring images was a routine occurence and it was very, very wrong.  We told our business units what our frequencies and retentions were and then expired their images in the background.  Not good at all.

NetBackup, by default, won't mix retentions on the same tape, so you have another options available:  turn on the ability to mix retentions.  This has a short-term upside of perhaps allowing your backups to complete but a long-term downside of not being able to re-use the tape until ALL of the images on that tape have expired.  So if you have a 2GB full backup of a file system with a 5-year retention on an LTO-3 tape with 700GB of incrementals with a 2-week retention, you're hanging on to that tape for 5 years.

Long-term, NetBackup is currently telling you that you don't have enough tapes to meet the requirements that you have specified.  Either get management signoff to change the requirements (shorter retentions or fewer generations), or buy tapes - it's their choice.  Our tape providers can give us pre-labeled tapes in a couple of days.

HI,

Marianne step i have already performed. and she is also right, let the retentions finish natually.
thats why i have only expired the tapes which are about to expire in next week. with bpexpdate -m <media-id> -d 0

also, the expansion unit tapes are over. no more place for new cartridges. now have to do capacity planning.

now, my same question is:

some older backups can be seen from the NBU GUI, selected the Reports --> Images on the Tapes and then run the report.

i selected the list of the older backups via date, and then get the backup_id and then deleted it via cmd line.

bpexpdate -backupid DataBase_1266960234 -d 0

will that works perfectly? if yes, how can we see the image on tape is deleted. because only this message is generated when we run the command

Are you SURE you want to delete DataBase_1266960234 y/n (n)? y

is there any other confirmation? that the selected image(backup_id) is deleted and the size of tape is released. like if DataBase_1266960234 is 4GB and when we delete it,  from available_media command

/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies/available_media | grep DBC007
DBC007  HCART3   TLD      0       99     -       8     689390139        ACTIVE/MPX

after deleting, the size was same.? why ?

As I've stated before - NBU can only re-use a tape when ALL the images on the tape have expired. NBU can only append if there's space left at the END of the tape.

If you expire a single image, NBU cannot re-use this space, as there is no guarantee whatsoever that the new image will fit it this space.

There are two excellent blogs describing this behaviour:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/unde...
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/you-...

Hope this helps?

the only way to "free-up" tapes is to expire a tape in its entirety, you cannot expire images & expect space to be freed up on tape, NetBackup just doesn't work that way.

We have been in your situation on a few occasions when unexpected tape usage took us by suprise - we were fire-fighting until a new delivery of tapes arrived by expiring in advance those tapes that were next due to expire 'naturally' by their retention levels.

As Ed says - "NetBackup is currently telling you that you don't have enough tapes to meet the requirements that you have specified"

kinldy correct me if i am wrong,

like the way i am deleteing the older backup images from tapes would work or not, not sure.

but the correct way is to expire the tape. ?
right ?

If the tape is full, just expiring one or two image will not help.

See my BLOG entry where I explain how NB writes to a tape to get a better understanding of why this will not work for you.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/understanding-how-netbackup-writes-tape

Thanks a bunch Guys, expiring the tapes had worked.

i expired the tapes which were about to expire in next week or two.