How to ERASE and FORMAT tapes????

[a96pirate]

I am running Veritas Netbackup 4.5 MP3 on a Windows 2000 Server SP3.

How do I ERASE and FORMAT tapes? I cannot find any way to perform these tasks within Veritas?

I have been told to use the Native backup program on W2K. But the Compaq Tape library and configuration is not usable with the Native program.....Attached via Fibre to a SAN etc...

Compaq finds the situation hard to believe, why would someone create a backup solution where you cannot erase tapes....

Any ideas????

 

[jjjon]

Afraid we've come across that too - can Format/Erase using Arcserve, but not Netbackup.
Seems the only way is to Expire then delete.

 

[PGPhantom]

You need to expire any image on the tape and then simply bplabel it. Running bplabel is akin to formatting.

Check for valid images:
bpimmedia -mediaid <TapeNumber> -L
(Unless you know that you do not want the tape but still check to clean up the database)

Then:
vmquery -m <TapeNumber>
(To get the pool number and status)

Then:
vmquery -deassignbyid <TapeNumber> <Pool> <Status>
(To expire the tape from the volume database on the master)

Also:
bpexpdate -m <TapeNumber> -d 0 -host <MediaServer> -force
(To expire the image on the media server)

 

[goace]

That works but the data is still on the tape until overwritten. You can quick erase or long erase in Backup Exec but only bplabel it on Netbackup.

 

[Stumpr]

The Phantom shows the correct way to remove the information concerning the images on the tape from the catalogs. And the steps outlined should indeed be done. However, the data will still reside on the tape. If the tape has not subsequently been written to then, the tape could be imported back into a NetBackup catalog. If you need to actually remove the bits and bytes from the tape then I suggest that after you follow the Phantoms steps that you additionally run the tape through a degausser. This is only for extreme security measures. Sometimes a degauser will not only destroy the data on the tape but also destroy the tape. Also there are software programs that will write 1's then 0's and then random 1's $ 0's to a tape.

 

[PGPhantom]

We had over 2,000 tapes that we needed to format for security resons - What ended up happening is that we rented a commercial degauser and cleaned them up that way - No DLT ot LTO tapes were harmed in the process