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  1. Home
  2. Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume II
  3. Reference topics
  4. About tape drive cleaning
  5. About operator-initiated cleaning
Veritas NetBackup™ Administrator's Guide, Volume II

About operator-initiated cleaning

A drive cleaning can be initiated regardless of the cleaning frequency or accumulated mount time of the drive. Clean standalone drives or robotic drives if a cleaning tape of the correct media type and residence for the drive was added to NetBackup.

NetBackup reports that a drive needs cleaning if either of the following conditions are true:

  • The value for the mount time is greater than the cleaning frequency.

  • The TapeAlert CLEAN_NOW or CLEAN_PERIODIC flag is set.

And either of the following conditions must be true:

  • The drive is a standalone drive and a cleaning tape is not defined.

  • The drive is a standalone drive and no cleaning tape has any cleanings that remain.

NetBackup displays NEEDS CLEANING as follows:

  • The Tape Cleaning Comment column of the Drive List in the Devices node of the NetBackup Administration Console.

  • The comment field of the output from the tpclean -L command.

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