On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 03:09:23PM -0400, MIchael Leone wrote:
> I'm wondering. If I have a tape that NetWorker has marked as "FULL" .. 
> .will it ever expire?

That depends on the contents and the retention policies.

> For example, if I have a browse/retention policy of 
> 2 months. NW fills up a tape, and marks it as "FULL". 2 months from now, 
> will that tape then become recycable, like other non-full tapes?

If that is true, and if there are no other non-expired backups that
depend on them, then yes.  Although I'm not sure why you make the
comparison to non-full tapes.  In my backups, I almost never have many
non-full tapes.  

> I've always just manually marked it as recyclable after the 2 month 
> period, and then ran a script to re-label all recyclable tapes. Mostly 
> because I thought that, being FULL, NetWorker would never use the tape 
> again.

No.  'Full' (and 'read only') have nothing to do with recyclability.  It
just means that Networker has decided the tape is full and won't place
any more data on the tape.

The way you're doing it is valid, but it's a lot of work, and probably
more error-prone.

"savesets" expire due to dependencies and retention policies.  When all
savesets on a volume become 'recyclable', the volume itself becomes
'recyclable'. 

-- 
Darren

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