DPM 2012 Tape Erase is taking TOO LONG !!!

March 12, 2015 by walidhegazy Leave a comment

last week I faced this issue while I was erasing tape on IBM Tape library from DPM Console so it moved to the Drive and 

 

 Erasing …. Erasing……Erasing …. Erasing   for more than 2 hours

 

 

after some research I found out that there are two types of erase ,long and short

 

Though short erase is much faster than long erase, it does not completely erase the data from the tape “Only mark it as free”. If you have a policy that all data from the tape must be erased and unrecoverable, do not enable short erase.By default, when you erase a tape by using System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) , DPM performs a long erase.

 

Enabling Short Erase

First make sure that your tape drive supports short erase, then you can enable it on the DPM server by creating the DWORD UseShortErase under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent.

 

Set the value of the DWORD to 00000000.

After this value is set, all erase operations on the DPM server will be short erases.

 

To revert to long erases, remove this registry key.

 

 

Hope this was helpful ….Thanks for reading