Understanding the Retention on Tape

[Jackobli]

Sorry to bother…
I did a short dig into documentation and the posts here, but wasn't able to find (excuse my impatience).

We don't really understand the exact behavior of the retention. If the date for retention has arrived, what happens to the media/catridges?

1. will the status in the «inventory» change from full, writable to retired?
2. will the content in Pool/Media-Set/Snapshot disappear?
3. And most interesting, have the media/cartridges to be formatted before next use or are they just used and overwritten? Perhaps formatted automagically?

We're in the second generation of a 4 week retention and would like to know before anything just happens

Thank you very much, regards, Urs

 

[dcsapak]

hi

1. will the status in the «inventory» change from full, writable to retired?

it's' 'expired' not 'retired' but yes

1. will the content in Pool/Media-Set/Snapshot disappear?

not as long the tapes are not overwritten

1. And most interesting, have the media/cartridges to be formatted before next use or are they just used and overwritten? Perhaps formatted automagically?

they are overwritten when they are used the next time automatically, but it's in the nature of tapes that if you start writing from the beginning, you cannot access the previous data later on the tape anymore (at least not to my knowledge)

 

[Jackobli]

Hello again

they are overwritten when they are used the next time automatically, but it's in the nature of tapes that if you start writing from the beginning, you cannot access the previous data later on the tape anymore (at least not to my knowledge)

Ok, they do not need to be reformatted, fine.
And of course will the data on the tape invalid after starting to overwrite.
But «expired» tapes will *always* be overwritten from the beginning, do they?

 

[dcsapak]

But «expired» tapes will *always* be overwritten from the beginning, do they?

yes, the only thing we leave in place is the tape media label which contains the uuid, label, and optionally the media-pool into which it was labeled