Automatically remove write protection from USB Disks in Backup Exec

Veritas BackupExec has a default, which flags disks which have been offline for more than 32 days as write protected.

BackupExec has expiration dates for each backup you have done. Once this date is reached, BackupExec does free up the disk space and deletes the old backups.

The idea behind this is, that these are disks which contain older backups, which should not automatically be purged from disk.Otherwise, when you connect the disk with the monthly backup of january on the server in june, for some restore, then BackupExec would remove these old backup sets.

That's usually not what you wish to have, this is why in the default this 32 day rule exists.

Of course you can tell BackupExec to either not set this write protection at all, or only for some longer time period. There is also a dangerous option, to allow BackupExec to delete all expired backup sets.

The default is usually fine, until you reinsert your january 2019 disk in january 2020. Then the disk will be write protected and you will have to remove the write protection first, or your backup jobs will fail.

Since this is a manual action you have to do on a regular basis, you can also automate it with some scripts.

With powershell und the windows task scheduler you can remove the write protection of the connected drives.

One important thing to note is, you must schedule the powershell script via task scheduler, if you define it as an "Run before job" in BackupExec, then the job will not start since it sees no writable disk in then system, and also does not start the "pre job run script"

This is the powershell script, which remove the write protection on all online disks in BackupExec, store it in a location on C:\...., for example as "c:\Program Files\Veritas\Backup Exec\Scripts\TurnWriteProtectedOff.ps1"

<# This script does remove the virtaul write protection on any online disks
   This way USB disks which had not been online for a long time wil be overwritable again
   2020 a.schild@aarboard.ch
#>
Import-Module "c:\Program Files\Veritas\Backup Exec\Modules\BEMCLI\BEMCLI.Scripts.psm1"

$disks= Get-BEStorageDevice
foreach ($d in $disks) {
    if ($d.Servers.IsOnline -eq "true") {
        # $d | Format-Table Name
        $d | Set-BEDiskStorageDevice -VirtualWriteProtectionEnabled $false
    }
}

In your task scheduler you then schedule it to be run 5-10 minutes before the regular backup job.

As command specify your powershell.exe as "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe"

In the script argugemt you pass:

 -File "C:\Program Files\Veritas\Backup Exec\Scripts\TurnWriteProtectedOff.ps1"

And define it to be run always, with no network resources and with highest priority.

Run linux commands via job queue

Often we have build long running jobs under linux which then call other shell scripts when they are finished.
Sometimes it would be possible to run such tasks partially concurrently, but for this we need some sort of job queue for the linux shell.
Unfortunally the cron/crontab does not allow such dependencies.

The simplest solution is to install the task spooler from this site.
You should however first look if your distribution has a binary package for it.

In debian you can install it via:
apt-get install task-spooler

After this, you can just put new jobs in the queue via the ts command.
Please note that in debian the command is named tsp to prevent name conflicts with the moreutils package.

When you just type ts(p) the system shows you all running/pending/completed tasks.

To put a new job in the queue you just type this:
ts(p) /home/user/mytask.sh

The job is then startet as soon as possible.
Per default the task spooler does start one task and waits until it is finished.
When the first task is finished it executes the next one from the queue and so on, until the queue is empty.

You can tell the task spooler to run multiple tasks concurrently,
you just set the maximum number of allowed concurrent executions with this command:
ts(p) -S 2
This would allow the task spooler to run up to two tasks concurrently.

You can also set priority on tasks, remove them  from the queue an so on.
Look at the man page for more details.

As of 0.7.3 the man page does not list all options, to see all available options, use the -h option.

The output of the jost is per default stored in files in the /tmp folder.
You can view them, or use ts(p) to send them via email to some destination.