I hijacked another thread (by accident) I'll put up the pertinent information in one place and hopefully someone else will have an idea.

AIX 7.1

Networker 8.2.0.4 (upgraded from 8.1.1.1)

DDDOS 5.5.0.8

Discovered 3 weeks ago savesets that should have expired 2 years ago, were recoverable and still on the Data Domain. There is a Sev2 case that has been open for 3 weeks.

There is a bug out there that fits these symptoms. 187916 (NW158511) - nsrim -X does not delete expired saveset on DDBOOST devices. The procedure for that bug is to upgrade to a version after 8.1.1.5 then run nsrim -X -v [volumename] and then the process will begin running normally on saveset completion.

It does not.

Yes I am able to manually delete savesets that have expired. The vast majority of my backup retention policies are a full on the weekend, and incrementals every week night. So I wrote a script that runs every friday during my maintenance window. It uses mminfo to look at ssretent and clretent times for more then 15 days ago, (gives me 2 full chances for a successful full, since they run every weekend.) grabs those ssid/clone id's runs nsrmm on the ssid and then runs nsrstage -C on each volume and then nsrim -x on each ddboost volume. This is a really dangerous procedure, they may well be a good reason some of these SaveSets are still hanging out, but not THOUSANDS of them. Removing the NSRMM line means none of the savesets get cleaned form DDBoost volumes.

I am not using Synthetic Fulls. The devices are not marked "Scan Needed". "Recycle" is set to "Auto" on the volume. The Data Domain Cleaning procedure does run every Tuesday at 6:00am.

The 4 hot-fixes released since 8.2.0.4 do not include any related fixes in their release notes.  Since their upgrade procedure for AIX is "delete it all, and then install again", I'm hesitant to upgrade.

I think removing expired savesets is a core functionality of the backup solution; so I intend to keep pushing the case. However, does anyone else have any other "click this checkbox you moron" ideas?