Image Cleanup Timeout Confusion

[brlawson]

I am confused about how to set up my Image Cleanup Timeout on a system with very simple requirements. I am bringing up a single Linux server that is Master, Media, and client all in one with a single Ultrium SCSI tape drive and I do backups once a day at night. In this case, it seems that the Image Cleanup that automatically runs at the end of my backup is sufficient to keep my catalog up to day. However, I can't come up with a timeout setting to stop the extra cleanups that occur every day. I tried 30 hours and my backups didn't run - starting window closed. When I used the default 12 hours, the cleanups got synched with my backups and seemed to interfere with them starting up each night. Right now, I am running 10 hours and I still get twice a day, but they stay out of the way of the backups. Is there a setting that will just let the cleanup run once a day after my backups and never any other time?

[Andy_Welburn]

Have you looked at changing the 'Catalog cleanup wait time'  ?

This "... specifies the minimum interval that can elapse before an image cleanup is run. Image cleanup is not run after a successful backup session until this minimum interval has elapsed since the previous image cleanup ..."

As opposed to the 'Image cleanup' which "... specifies the maximum interval that can elapse before an image cleanup is run. Image cleanup is run after every successful backup session (that is, a session in which at least one backup runs successfully). If a backup session exceeds this maximum interval, an image cleanup is initiated..."

Both are looking at the same thing but from a different point of view!!

[brlawson]

Hmmm, Andy, my catalog cleanup wait time is 60 minutes and my image cleanup interval is 10 hours. The wait time should never come into play because I backup only once every 24 hours, so it is long expired. Right now, my cleanups run immediately after my catalog backups which run immediately after my data backups each night. Of course I get another image cleanup 10 hours later each day.

I guess my question is why in our situation, I would ever want image cleanups to run except after each backup. Things are working OK, now, I just wondered if I am missing a concept. I don't seem to be able to turn off scheduled cleanups occuring at other times of the day, when they are superfluous.

Thanks,
Brandt
 

[Andy_Welburn]

... that you could change the 'Catalog Cleanup wait time' such that the minimum wait time means it can only run once in a 24 hour period.

As it stands, an Cleanup can run 60 minutes after the last one. So, for example, if you've got several backup sessions:
Session 1 finishes & clean-up occurs.
Session 2 starts a few minutes later & finishes within 60 minutes so no clean-up.
Session 3 starts & finishes a few hours later so a clean-up occurs.
If you extend this to, say 12 hours, then no clean-up could occur until a session finished 12 hours after the last successful backup & subsequent clean-up.

I was thinking, maybe you could amend this to 20+ hours so that no clean-up can occur within 20+ hours of the last successful backup session. Altho' not sure how this would affect the 'Image cleanup' setting (after all it appears that this is the reason why you are getting your 'second' clean-up), or whether you could just change the latter to 20+ hours?

We have ours set at the default 12hours/60 minutes & don't have any issues. At the end of the day it's just deleting old, expired images or compressing etc depending on your settings.

I would be tempted to leave as is. As I understand it, it is mainly there to ensure you do get a clean-up if you have backup sessions that take a long time - if the session goes over 12 hours (default) it doesn't wait until the session is finished, but runs one immediately. Whereas, the wait time ensures that you don't get too many if you have a lot of short backup sessions.

[brlawson]

Andy,

I spent a few weeks some time back messing with this. I set the cleanup timeout to 30 hours, assuming that I would never get any extra cleanups since I have 1 daily backup every 24 hours. Somehow, things got sideways and my backups didn't run at all because "the backup window closed". When I left it at 12 hours, every day, my backup waited on my tape for 20 minutes to get started, exactly the length of time the previous night's backup lasted. Meanwhile the cleanup ran. I didn't like that because when I get in production, the backup will last a couple of hours.

That was during the steep part of deployment and I may have had some other interactions. Now I am getting near production and am cleaning up small bothersome details. Maybe I will go back and gently change one thing at a time . . .

Thanks,

Brandt

[Andy_Welburn]

"...

 my backup waited on my tape for 20 minutes to get started, exactly the length of time the previous night's backup lasted.
..."

That could be schedule creep. If you're running the same schedule day after day & the frequency is set to, say, 1 day, then the next time a job runs it will not start until 24hours after the last one finished i.e. 24hours & 20 minutes after the previous one started.

At least I think that's the explanation (!!) - it's not something we come across as we have a different schedule per day of the week with the frequency is set to 1 day.

"...Use the Frequency attribute to specify how much time must elapse between the successful completion of a scheduled task and the next attempt..."

[brlawson]

I am running calendar based policies with start windows of 22:00 daily and they always start right on time except when I was having the 20 minute problem. During that time, the activity monitor showed that the job had requested resources at 22:00 but was not granted them until 22:20 or so.

I went back through my notes and found why I started messing with image cleanup. Back on 6.5.2, image cleanup would fail once in a while (... socket read failed (23)) and it seemed that it was during backups. So I started messing with the timeout so it wouldn't get synched with the backups to see if that fixed it. That's when I tried the 30 hour timeout and then my backups started failing each night for the start window closing. So I went to 10 hours to keep it out of synch - i.e. not 24 hours after the automatic cleanup at the end of the previous night's backup.

Meanwhile, I updated to 6.5.3.1 and had to rework some stuff like the catalog backup to get it all working again.

It all works with the 10 hour trick, I just there would be a way to set it so that it just does one a day after each backup.

Thanks, Andy