Manually clearing Tapes with Infinite(9) Retention.
I have been stuck on release NetBackup 6.5.4 for way too long.
I need to free up space in the root filesystem because the Tape Catalog file is filling it up. (Not desparate yet) I've been given permission to remove any Catalog data older that 1 year. But on my release, I cannot find out the best way to remove the data with the GUI interface.
First quesiton: Is there a way with the GUI interface to remove Catalog data? If so how?
Second question: I've found /opt/openv/netbackup/db/images directory. There is another file for the 2 servers Netbackup stores catalog data. Will removing the ONLY the directories inside the server directories accomplish the same thing without harming Netbackup?
(IMPORTANT NOTE: I do see that I am not to remove db_marker.txt under any circumstances.)
I've had a hard time pushing the "powers that be" to upgrade, but it hasn't been a high priority for them - even when I've communicated that I have will have to beg for help, because Symantec is not obligated to answer my questions on a release that old. (Totally NOT Symantec's fault.)
Note that deleting the catalog entries essentially prevents you from being able to restore any data from the old tapes. You can import the old tapes if something requires you to restore something that old, but without the catalog to tell you which tapes the old data was on, you would likely have to reimport all the old tapes first before you could recover anything, and that would just make your catalog grow back to the current size again.
If you are looking to remove some of the catalog data, but still keep the ability to restore from the backups on old tapes, you have to use the "bpcatlist" and "bpcatarc" commands from the command line.