You could try stopping the NW service on the non-critical clients and restart the group backup. After the backups are completed you can start the NW services again. You will see some werrors which you will ingnore.

I want to automatically (unattended) abort them. If I was standing here watching them I would not have had a problem because I would have just put in another tape.

We run our backups at night when nobody is on the system and they are unattended. Most times that is not a problem.

Would depend on how the backups were initiated. If they were backup groups that were triggered from the Networker scheduler, you can stop them from the NMC gui. Monitoring->groups right click on the group name and select stop.

If it is a backup group that is invoked from the command line, you might need to kill the savegrp process and may also need to log on to each of the client machines and kill the save processes.

If it is a client initiated backup, logon to the client and kill the save process.

Trust this helps.

Well ... My mistake ... I do remember that there are some time outs that can be set. Don't remember the exact ones. Sorry.

After re-reading my original post I noticed I was not clear that these are unattended backups.

The way I have it set up is:
Each client has one or more groups
No group has more than one client
Each group has its own pool
Each group has its own schedule
Each group has its own policy
Each group has its own directive
All backups are after hours and unattended.

What I would like is, if after an hour it is still waiting for a tape either release the drive or abort the backup.

Is there a way to do that or should I be looking at writing my own script?

That does not seem to be the answer because some of these ran out of tape Saturday night and were still running this morning (Monday). All the groups appear to be set for a 30 minute time out.

Look at the inactivity Time OUt field in your Group configuration screen. Use the "Field Help" to see the field description and purpose. You may find you answer there.

Please correct me if my understanding is wrong.

The problem seems to be that once the tape in the drive gets full, it does not get ejected and NW keeps waiting for a new tape. If this is the case, set the "idle device timeout" in the tape library properties to any value greater than 0. If the value is 0 there will never be a eject. NW will wait for as many minutes as specified before ejecting and releasing the drive. This will not stop your earlier groups from waiting for a tape but will release the drive for other backups for which tapes are available.

There is no automatic abort when waiting tapes - it may go on for days. Workaround is to have enough tapes ready in library.


Script.

Please note that if you have enough tapes in library then this is different kind of issue.

You need to enable the diagnostic mode in NMC and look under the timers tab in the jukebox properties.

Yes, you are correct in that assumption. I went to the library properties but could not find that field

I was affraid of that. The reason I don't want to fill the jukebox is because I want to be sure tapes are recycled and swapped out on regular intervals. Some of the browse and retention policies cut it close on when the tape is available and might not recycle before it picks it up. We don't have a budget for more tapes so I have to keep an eye on the ones we have.

I will look into both these possiblities and see which will work the best for me.

Thanks