If I understand correctly, using this system your incremental backups are larger than your full backups.  You could
help with this by having less incrementals and more fulls - like runnning a full every week instead of two weeks. 

As for a way of automating the deletion, if Networker considers the day2 backup as an incremental, he's going to go looking for the
day1 full backup when you want to restore so I wouldn't recommend deleting it.  I'd say your best bet is increasing the
amount of fulls and reducing your retention time.  If you want to delete these anyway, the best way to do this is by fixing
the retention time to what you are actually going to be able to keep the data for given your circumstances and let NetWorker
sort out the recycling of the tapes without any manual deletions.

hope this helps,

-Bobby

Hello Bobby,

Thanks for your response. Please find my comments inline.

If I understand correctly, using this system your incremental backups are larger than your full backups.　 You could help with this by having less incrementals and more fulls - like runnning a full every week instead of two weeks.

[Hemant]: I forget to mentioned, using wbadmin the networker is just interface and providing the tape management. The actual backup and restore is done by Windows wbadmin GUI. So if we have an 5 incremental wbadmin backup then we can restore till last 5 days data (as incremental backup is appended in the full backup)

As for a way of automating the deletion, if Networker considers the day2 backup as an incremental, he's going to go looking for the

day1 full backup when you want to restore so I wouldn't recommend deleting it.　 I'd say your best bet is increasing the amount of fulls and reducing your retention time.

[Hemant]: As I mentioned previouly if we have incremental backup then we don't need full bakcup.

If you want to delete these anyway, the best way to do this is by fixing the retention time to what you are actually going to be able to keep the data for given your circumstances and let NetWorker sort out the recycling of the tapes without any manual deletions.

Can you please suggest something now.

Best Regards,

Hemant Joshi

If you are sure you only need the incrementals, then set everything to expire really quickly and these volumes will be recycled.  The volume will only expire however when every saveset on that tape is expired.  This may not be quick enough for you so you may want to set the 'default capacity' for the drive labelling the tape to lower than its real capacity.   You can set this at the drive level in diagnostic mode.  It will reduce the used capacity of the tape and therefore there will be less savesets on the tape and it will recycle more quickly.

If you really haven't got enough tapes to manage this system normally through Networker, then you will need to implement a script which recycles the older tapes taking the tapes with the oldest volretent.  You would need to test this very thoroughly first to ensure you are not deleting anything you need.

-Bobby