Deassigning NetBackup Volumes

Caution It is recommended that you do not manually deassign NetBackup volumes. If you do, be certain that the volumes do not have any important data. If you are uncertain, copy the images to another volume.

The procedure is different depending on whether the volume is currently being used for regular backups or for backing up the NetBackup catalogs. See the following two topics for instructions.

Deassigning NetBackup Regular Backup Volumes

NetBackup deassigns a regular backup volume when the retention periods have expired for all backups on the volume. If you do not need the data and do not want to wait for normal expiration to occur, you can expire the backup by using the bpexpdate command on the master server.

This command is located in the /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd directory and has the following format:

bpexpdate -d 0 -m media id [-host hname]

Where:

media id is the media ID to be expired.

hname is the name of the NetBackup media server that has the media ID (the server where

media ID was written). Specify hname only if your configuration uses master servers and media servers.

The following example assumes there is only one NetBackup server and expires all the

backups on media ID ABC001:

/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpexpdate -d 0 -m ABC001

If you use this command to expire the volume, NetBackup stops tracking the backups that are on it and deassigns it. This makes the volume available to be reused, deleted, or its volume pool to be changed. You can manually expire the backups regardless of the volume’s prior state (frozen, suspended, and so on).