Forum Discussion

UCB_SA's avatar
UCB_SA
10 years ago

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 ...
Backup and Recovery
HP-UX
NetBackup
Tip-How to
  • RonCaplinger's avatar
    RonCaplinger
    10 years ago

    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.

RonCaplinger's avatar
RonCaplinger
Level 6
10 years ago

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.