Poor form to reply to my own post, but I couldn't sleep till I found a solution. Its nearly 4am now and I think I have one!
Someone suggested directly to me that I could select from the backups table and run the unsupported "delete objects" command on each file. I tested that on a single file and it seemed to work, but I'm not feeling comfortable with it for the rather large number of entries I have to delete. So how about this? Its like performing surgery with the space shuttle robot arm but it might just work. Upgrade to TSM 5.5. This is necessary anyway. Set up a second TSM Server on the same box. Export the exchange data server-to-server from the old server to the new one using the fromdate/todate parameters to give me the slice of data that I need. Repeat as necessary with mergefiles on the import side. Once a slice has been copied across I can change the retentions on the old server and expire inventory to delete that slice. Please feel free to throw in your two cents worth if you can see a flaw in this I'm starting to feel like Geordy LaForge in Star Trek TNG ---- "If we just route the power from the core through to the phaser array".... Steve. __________________ > > Sorry about that - take 2 > > Hi All > I have a customer with a small TSM Setup on windows , DB is only 3GB. TSM is 5.3.4 > Last August the legal eagles decreed that all expiration was to stop, and my predecessors did this. We are now at breaking point with a tape library that > is about to burst, and finally someone (me) decided to do something about it. > The majority of the data is exchange backups, with a twice a week full, four times a day incremental backup strategy. Legal has finally decided that > We need to keep all backups from the earliest we have to end of August. >From end of August to mid Feb we can delete all incrementals and all full backups except the last one of every month. >I can see no way of doing this from the exchange client >using the dsmc client to connect I can see appropriately named files for full backups and incrementals when I use the "q backup {filespace}\ -subdir=y" >Attempting a delete backup of any sort or even a q backup on a fully qualified name gives me a no files found message >tsm> q backup {BLKVMSG001A\BLK1ASG4}\data\0000\BLK1ASG4A250\full -inactive > ANS1092W No files matching search criteria were found >Is there any way around this? or can API -created files only be deleted by the API? >Thanks >Steve >Steve Harris >TSM Admin, Sydney Australia