Retired Tapes

[emad]

Hello, everybody
I have a problem related to tapes that some tapes became retired after while though it still have big free space .
Could anyone help me ?

[Shestakov]

Hello Emad,
Could you describe how much space do you have left on the tapes and what vendor is that?
Thanks!

[veremin]

Retired state of tape doesn't have anything to do with a free space. Tape is moved to Retired Media Pool when drive/library instructs a backup server that media has become unusable and has to be taken out of service. Thanks

[emad]

Hello Emad,
Could you describe how much space do you have left on the tapes and what vendor is that?
Thanks!

Hello Shestakov,
Thanks for the reply
All tapes that i have are HP with 1.4 TB storage, some of them who went retired have 1.3 TB free space and others are between 500 GB & 400 GB free space.

[emad]

Hello Eremin,

what do you think should be done to retrieve tapes back to its predefined pool

[veremin]

Why do you want to continue using tapes that have excessive number of errors associated with them? Retired tape typically should not be used for backup operations any longer (just for restoration ones). Thanks.

[emad]

Because i have large numbers( 5 out of 8 ) of tapes that were moved to retired pool.
So should i buy more tapes every time i got retired tapes even if those retired tapes still have a large free space that it is not used?

[veremin]

So should i buy more tapes every time i got retired tapes even if those retired tapes still have a large free space that it is not used?

Correct. Actually, amount of free space left doesn't matter here, what matters is the fact that drive manufacturer thinks about those tapes as the ones that should not be used any longer, unless you want to face corrupted, unrestorable backups at some point of time.

I believe you can move those medias out of retired media pool by tweaking product database or using PowerShell scripting. However, please, before doing that think about undesired consuquences that such decision might have.

Thanks.