Correct, I didn't delete all the images, just a few of them so I can't
free it up without duplicating.  Thanks for the help.

-tim

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Darren
Dunham
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 13:49
To: Veritas-bu at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] FW: Freeing up tape space

> Running 4.5 FP3 on Win2K
> 
> I deleted some unneeded images off a few tapes but NetBackup is still
> showing them being full.  Is there a way to get the tapes to recognize
> that it has free space on it?  Thanks in advance. =20

Are you deleting *all* images on the tape (usually done with bpexpdate)?
If not, you can't use the space.

Virtually every tape technology that I'm aware of does not allow random
writes on the media.  If you wrote to a spot in the middle of the tape,
it would be the equivalent of erasing all data after that spot.

Netbackup won't use any space that's not at the end of the tape.  If you
need, you could copy all the data on a tape that you must keep to
another volume, then expire the volume.  That lets you keep some of the
data while reclaiming some of the space.  But you have to have the extra
space for the copy temporarily.

That's why NB only puts images with the same retention policy on the
same tape.  It's expected they'll all expire around the same time so you
don't have unusable "holes" in the tape for a long time.

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham at taos.com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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