Data Protector Express 4.00sp1 catalog question

[Kostas Arvanitidis]

Hi all,

I have a couple of questions about DPExpress. First of all is it possible to erase selected files from the tape (i I have a 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader)? And where can i browse the catalog? My guess is from the Administration/catalog menu am I on the right path?

[thomasr · Accepted solution]

Tape doesn't allow for selective erase.    In essence, you start at the beginning, and keep writing until you're done.   You can append another job, but you can't go back into a tape with some jobs on it and delete individual jobs and then reclaim that space.

You can use your backup application to 'expire' jobs, but the space on the tape won't be available again until everything has expired (or the tape is erased/formatted).

You can never erase files from inside a backup job, so far as I know.

It's possible to use most backup applications to copy a job from one tape to another -- this is a lot easier if you have two tape drives!   In that case, you might copy jobs A, B, D, and F to a new tape, leaving C and E untouched.   When you have your copy, you'd run an erase on the old tape to allow it to be re-used.

NOTE: there is a relatively new feature on LTO called Linear Tape File System (LTFS) that uses tape as file storage... but it's only useful for really big files (think video), and if you were using that, you wouldn't be using a backup application to write to tape.

[Kostas Arvanitidis]

Hi Thomas,

thanks for the useful info on my question. Indeed i'm using tape to backup video files. Unfortunatelly I had the 1/8 G2 long before the announcement of LTFS.

Anyway I'm stuck atm with DPE and it's features (some of them poor, like the search function)

Thank you for your reply though