I'm running DPM 2010 with a Dell PowerVault 122T autoloader that has an Ultrium LT0-1 drive. For some apparent reason DPM filled all 7 tapes in the autoloader with data ranging from about 10MB to 70MB, marked them all as belonging to a group, and now refuses to allow me to mark them as free or erase them without stopping my protection group and deleting my data.
Stopping the protection group, removing replica data, and so forth is not an acceptable solution. I need to know if there's a way to force DPM to erase tapes without stopping the group. I've already tried marking them as "free" with a powershell script I found but this isn't working and I basically have 7 worthless tapes in my autoloader, as DPM won't append data or overwrite anything that's on them. My retention range is set to 1 week for tapes.
So, how do you force DPM to erase tapes without having to delete the entire backup job and associated replica data? I've got a rather large amount of data replicating off onto my Clariion storage array and I can't delete all that data, reconfigure a new backup job, and wait several hours for replication to take place again. As it stands now, it looks like I'm going to have to take all the tapes out and reformat them in another LTO tape drive.
/rant @ Microsoft DPM Developers: I'm not sure where you learned how to plan for and write code for tape management, but being able to perform tape operations like erasing, formatting, naming, and appending data to them independent of disk based replication is one of the most fundamental features of any backup product. I'm speechless as to how you managed to overlook something so obvious.