StorageTek 9840 (and guessing 9940) tapes also can't be erased with a
degausser.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: John Stoffel [mailto:stoffel AT lucent DOT com] 
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 11:04 AM
To: Johnson, Tony -Research
Cc: Veritas-Bu (E-mail)


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

Depending on the media and whether or not you want to be able to re-use the
media in the future.  You can get a Bulk Eraser, which is just a device
which projects a strong magnetic field.  This works for DLT tapes, but not
for LTO (and some others!) because they LTO tapes depend on the factory
written servo track on the media.

If you don't care about the tape afterwards, any tape can be bulk erased.  

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

You'll have to do this will some tapes if you want to re-use them.

John
   John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies
         stoffel AT lucent DOT com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-399-0479
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