Expire List of Tapes in Netbackup

When working in a large Netbackup environment, there often comes a time when you need to expire a large amount of tapes all at once.

This was exactly the scenario that happened to me when a company I consulted at changed their retention periods.  The change of retention periods from 1 year to 1 month meant they wanted to free up all the tapes that contained images that were more then a month old.

The solution to the problem was a script that basically does the following:

1) Reads in a list of media id's from a file.
2) Determine which media server the media id is assigned.
3) Expire the media id from the Netbackup catalog.

The script is here:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$master="hostname of master server";
open DATA, "cat /home/schmaubj/media.list|";
while () {
 $mediaid = $_;
 chomp($mediaid);
 open DATA2, "/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpmedialist -U -m $mediaid|";
 while () {
  $line = $_;
  chomp($line);
  if ($line =~ /Server Host/) {
   ($junk,$mhost) = split(/=/,$line); 
   chomp($mhost);
    $mhost =~ s/ *$//;  
          $mhost =~ s/^ *//; 
  }
 }
 close (DATA2);
 print "Media ID: $mediaid\n";
 print "Media Server Host: $mhost\n";
 print "Expiring now...\n";
 $expire=`/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpexpdate -force -d 0 -m $mediaid -host $mhost -M $master`;
}
close (DATA);