Hello,

10-20 years ago cleaning tape drives every so many hours was common practice.  Today, it would prematurely age any tape that was mounted on the drive to be cleaned as well as the tape drive itself.  You should only clean a drive when it tells you that it it needs cleaning.

The current community version will tell you this if you have it setup correctly, but you need to know what you are doing.  The current Enterprise version will tell you much more clearly when a drive needs cleaning, and in the near future, the Enterprise version will be able to automatically clean a tape for you when requested by the drive.

Of course as Heitor pointed out, you can set your autochanger to do automatic cleaning.

The next community version coming out later this year, will have all the current Enterprise tape handling features (automatic tape cleaning is not yet implemented so it will not be in the enterprise version).

You do not need to stop bacula to clean a tape drive, but doing so is OK also.

With a tiny amount of the money they saved switching from Netbackup to Open Source Bacula, you should encourage the University to send you to the Bacula Admin I course.  A lot of these issues will become much easier for you. :-)

Best regards,

Kern

I have a tape labeled CLN001 and I have cleaning tape defined as such but it never seems to get used.

To clean, I stop bacula, mount cleaning tape, it cleans, I unmount & restart.  Sometimes (I think) I tell the robot to clean.

Anyways, on Netbackup, it just auto-cleans every so many hours.  Is this what everyone experiences or am I doing it wrong again?


Robert Threet
http://yesistilluseperl.blogspot.com/

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