Hello
I need some advice on how to manage media reporting when there are certain tapes which I don't want to ever show as expired (ready for reuse) in DPM. Specifically, is there a way to modify the expiration time of a tape after it has been written by DPM?
Some Background:
We have a newly installed DPM 2010 system that we are testing as a replacement to our Backup Exec system. We are using disk for short-term protection and one partition of a Dell TL2000 for long-term backups to tape. Our LT backup objectives are to keep 4 weekly backups offsite along with monthly offsite backups (kept for 7 years).
Since we have only a single tape drive in the library partition I don't have the option of having DPM make monthly copies of the weekly tapes via multiple LT objectives. Our intended workaround is to allow DPM to make the weekly tapes and then just rotate out the last weekly tape set for each given month. The only problem is that we don't want those "weekly" tapes to show up in the expired tapes report since we have no intention of brining them back onsite and reusing them.
I've seen this thread about removing old tapes but I'm not sure of the downside to completely deleting tapes from the DB that I might one day wish to restore data from.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Steve