> 
> I am in the unenviable position of having to destroy backups.  I was just
> wondering if there is a command line way in netbackup to erase tapes in a
> robot.

This depends on what you mean by "erase".

If you're worried about someone taking the media and attempting to do
expensive analysis on it, then you're going to need at least a bulk
eraser.  Physical destruction is always best though.

If you just want the tapes to not be readable in a standard drive, then
you may just need to relabel it with 'bplabel'.  What model drive are
you talking about?  Most (8mm, DLT, ..) will not read past the last
write on the tape.  If you label the front of the tape again with
bplabel, then the rest of the tape is "unreadable".  If you're going to
continue to use the tapes for backups in your system, that may be
sufficient.

> I really don't want to write zeros to the tape drive and load the tapes
> manually

Overwriting with data still leaves residual information on the tape that
can be deciphered.
-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Unix System Administrator                    Taos - The SysAdmin Company
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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