Today I’ve noticed that the office ARCserve backup system was asking for tapes, even though there were old tapes in the drive that should have been overwritten. I then looked in the arcserve device view and saw that the tapes in question could not be erased, or formatted… hmmm.
So what happened? Looks like when the Media Pool was created, it wasn’t set up with a “Prune Retention Time” flag set and even though the retention time was only 6 days, the tapes weren’t being purged from the database after 6 days, so they couldn’t be overwritten.
THE SOLUTION:
First, turn on purging so this doesn’t have to be a routine in the future:
1.) Go to ‘Administration’ -> ‘Media Pool’
2.) Set the “Purge Retention Time”
Next, allow the tapes that are write protected to be erased:
1.) Go to ‘Administration’ -> ‘Database’
2.) Delete any records related to the tape you want to erase
3.) Restart the ARCserve Database Engine service
4.) Re-inventory the tape under ‘Administration’ -> ‘Device’ using “quick inventory”
You should now be able to erase/format the tape, and in the future the tape should be purged automatically after the time you’ve set in the pool.