When the job is archived, the Arch column in the manually archive jobs area in Archive › Libraries, and the Archive column in Jobs › History are automatically marked. This shows the jobs have been archived.
The Mark Media As Archive checkbox makes a small change on the Media Inventory tab, which is something that is generally used for organizational purposes.
This tab works with the History tab to allow you to see the history of all jobs archived on various drives. You can name drives (under the Manage Disk icon) and note their locations for long term storage. This information can be modified on from the Media Inventory tab without requiring the physical drive to be in the appliance, so if you change locations from site 1 to site 2, this can be updated on the appliance as well.
The mark media as archive button will mark a status indicator on the Media Inventory list as archived rather than appendable or empty. This will allow you to indicate that you are not making any further changes to a drive and are shipping it offsite to a long term storage facility. The other thing mark media as archive button does is prevent the jobs that are written to the drive when this button is selected to no longer be purge-able from the drive. This will require a reformat of the drive to remove the data that was archived at that time.
The History and Media Inventory tabs are used for this historical and organizational documentation of the archived jobs. We are working to get more robust documentation about this area of the appliance and will post a knowledge base article as soon as it is available.
There are two ways to clear data from an archive drive:
- Reformatting (recommended)
- Reformatting the archive drive.
Archive › History can be cleared by reformatting disks (as opposed to deleting all the jobs from the disk). This removes them from archive history, or at least shows these jobs as purged which is not shown by default.
- Purging
- If you only want to clear out specific jobs instead of reformatting the entire drive, go to Archive › Libraries › Manage Disk › select View Archived Jobs. From here you can select specific jobs by clicking on the boxes to the left, then selecting Purge Selected Jobs.
These purged jobs will still show in Archive › History or Archive › Media Inventory as available. If you are interested in accurate documentation of long term archive storage, it is recommended to reformat the drive (see above).
This option will not show if there is an Archive in process.