Hi @Odi Et Amo 

How do you know which tapes to mark bad?

You are better off deleting the jobs from the tape copy. Marking the tapes associated with a job as bad does not remove the jobs or de-allocated licensed capacity.

Hello @Odi Et Amo 

License usage is only going to be reflected from your primary copy. Can you confirm if this is a secondary copy or primary that was impacted? 

In regards to the first part of your question i would recommend a Dev escalation through support to achieve this. 

Kind regards

Albert Williams

I already had a vague familiarity with what was in our tape storage location.  Pulling a list of tapes associated with a subclient is pretty easy.  I did that, exported it, and then checked off the tapes I still have possession of.  The rest of the tapes in the list are definitely ash.

I’ve only done this with one subclient so far.

@Albert Williams 

I believe some of the data that was on our tapes does represent primary storage at this time, though I’m not familiar with how the software counts that.  Our disk retention policy allows the older data that has already been copied to tape to age out of disk storage(or so I think).  For reference, some of the data in question goes back 14+ years.

Thanks for the recommendation.  I wasn’t even aware this was something I could reach out to Support about, but I’ll do that.

Hello @Odi Et Amo 

Thanks for the response and details. Support is always there to help and for things like this, given the scale we can engage Dev to provide scripts and other such things to clean the CSDB.

Your capacity license only cares about the size of data you are currently protecting. For example if you decom a client, your license usage will go down. We don't charge you to keep your data, we charge you to protect it. 

I would guess that 14+ year old data will have no impact on your license unless the client is still actively being protected. 

Kind regards

Albert Williams

This brings up an interesting question; one I’ll probably ask in the course of this support engagement. I’m not very familiar with how the data is structured, but much of this tape data is/was incorporated into a content index.  Files and email separately, but that index still exists and is searchable.  I would want to make sure we avoid any action that would impact the current searchable dataset, even if we can’t restore the original messages.

Thanks again for the insight.