Kevin,

At last - one I can answer :-)

PANIC NOT!

On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Kevin Freels wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I ran a "bpmedialist -summary", just learning some of the commands so
[...]
> Number of ACTIVE media that, as of now:
>        3 - will expire within 1 week
>             NTF019 expires 06/10/2004 18:34
>             EXC087 expires 06/11/2004 21:16
>             EXC083 expires 06/12/2004 19:04
[...]
> In a robot that holds 180 tapes, almost 100 of them are inactive!!!!
>
> Anyways, does the "expires" flag mean the *image* expires, or the actual
> *tape* expires?

In a sense, both. It means that all the images will expire (ie reach the
end of their retention period), so the tape expires (becomes free for
reuse) It does NOT mean that the tape cannot be used again.

> If it's the tape, we're going to lose over 2/3rds of our
> remaining active tapes within a month!!! Yikes!!!!!! At $40 a piece,
> it's going to be fun when I tell my boss that we need to order about $5k
> in new tapes or we'll have a virtually empty robot in less that a month!

Might be interesting to tell him that anyway, just to see his face ;-)

> And does this mean the images on the "expired" tapes are going to be
> purged from the catalog (will we lose our archives)?

Yes, they will be purged from the catalog. So yes, you will lose your
archives - but only because they have reached the end of the retention
period you have defined for them. If you want to keep them for ever, you
will have to give them a retention period of INFINITY. Oh, and go back to
your boss for real this time, because you will need more tapes.

> (NOTE: I am coming into this after having someone else who worked here,
> i.e., it wasn't me)
>
> I know that it's possible to go and reset the expiration date on tapes
> to whatever you want, including "never", but I do think that all tapes
> should be expired eventually to maintain data integrity. But one guy
> here says he just put a new tape in the bot a week ago and it's set to
> expire in three weeks! That just seems wrong, I don't think he's had
> this tape sitting on the shelf for three years.
>
> Any clues?

It's got nothing to do with the age of the tape, the number of mounts
thereof, or anything like that. That's a totally separate issue.

HTH,
 Richard Hall
  (working late because a non-layered volume just had a failed disc in
   both plexes at the same time. But you probably don't want to know
   that - I certainly didn't!!)