Manually clearing Tapes with Infinite(9) Retention.

[UCB_SA]

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.)

[INT_RND]

NEVER MANUALLY MODIFY ANYTHING IN THE "/db/" FILE TREE.

You can. I've seen it done. Just don't.

The best way to reclaim space is to start with a manual cleanup

bpimage -cleanup

(Standard daily cleanup procedure)

bpexpdate -deassignempty

(Deassign empty media from expired images)

nbdelete -allvolumes

(Not as scary as it sounds, this just removes deleted fragments from all volumes)

The answer to your question is yes. You can expire images from the GUI:

Netbackup Management > Catalog

You first search for the date range (Anything older than a year)

In the search results you can right click and expire entries.

[RonCaplinger · Accepted solution]

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.

[Marianne]

I see that this discussion is still unresolved after about 3 weeks....

My 2c:

Firstly have another look at Infinite retention level.
Is this really a business requirement or was this level chosen because there are no default options for e.g. 5 year retention?
Are you aware that you can customize retention levels?

You can 'remove' catalog data by expiring images that are no longer needed for restores.
To expire all images associated with a piece of media:
bpepdate -m <media-id> -d 0

Another option to deal with limited disk space is to add more disk storage and move images to the new location, followed by creation of symbolic link.
See http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH69970