A tape which is full is not reusable until all of the data on it is
expired.  Chances are you've expired parts of tapes, but there's still
valid images from other clients on the same tapes, so they can not
yet be reused.

christian e writes:
> Hi,all
> 
> We recently changed a lot of our policies and I began to expire
> backups.Somehow all that work did not have the effect I wanted as I
> still have to insert blank tapes to make backups.Could I be missing
> something basic here ? Here's what I did:
> 
> * got a list of images for a client:
> 
>       bpimagelist -idonly -client server1 -d 04/05/2001 -e 10/04/2001
> 
> then I pulled only the backup_id from that:
> 
>       bpimagelist -idonly -client server1 -d 04/05/2001 -e 10/04/2001 | awk
> '{print $5}' > idlist.txt
> 
> * then I forced those ids to be expired :
> 
>       for id in $(cat idlist.txt)
>       do
>       bpexpdate -backupid $id -d 0 -force
>       echo $id expired
>       done
> 
> I repeated this for a lot of machines ,but still it seems as if there's
> not more free space on tapes than before..I really can't figure this
> out..Can someone help me out here ??
> 
> running netbackup datacenter 3.4 on win2k.
> 
> best regards
> 
> Christian
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-- 
Larry Kingery 
  If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too?