Old Images

[MohitK]

Hi

I have NBU 7.1.0.4 running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Recently I have noticed that "Images" folder under "D:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\db" has grown up to 130GB. Upon checking the folders I found that old images are still contained. Even CatStore folder has some old large files. There seems to be some sort of lock files as well which I am guessing is stopped these old files from clearing.

Can someone please assist me in clearing old files? Any ideas are appreciated,

Thanks

MK

[Deeps]

Are you certain about the retention of these images ? If these images have pass their retention level then they should be cleanuped by Netbackup.Run a manual cleanup (using bpimage -cleanup) and check if you get any error ? Also check if you have <install path>\Netbackup\bin\NOexpire .This touch file will stop Netbackup to expire any image even if they pass their retention.

DeepS

[Marianne]

Have a look firstly at your backup policies. What are longest retention periods? You should normally not be concerned about files in images folder as NBU runs image cleanup job every 12 hours to delete expired image files. 130 GB is not a lot. We often see image folders bigger than 600G, even towards 1TB.

[MohitK]

Hi Deeps/Marianne

My backup policies have 3 schedules with different retention periods. Retention periods are 3 weeks, 27 days and infinity.

NOexpire file doesnt exist in bin folder.

I have also attached 2 screenshots for more information.

Actual problem is that drive is 136GB and NBU services stop when this drive fills up. I need to clear files from Images folder to create space

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

infinity backup images will first expire in 2038.

Consider to expand disk space instead for expiring images. Battling limited catalog disk space is time consuming and annoying. The associated cost in time may very well be much larger that the additional disk space.

[Marianne]

Why do you need Infinity retention? This is why you see 'Old images' in the folder. You cannot clear files without expiring backups which will result in data loss situation. Shutting down of EMM when NBU installation path fills up is a good thing - it prevents corruption of relational databases. As per Nicolai's advice: Get more disk space. Images can be moved to a different drive letter. Another option is Catalog compression or catalog archiving. Details in NBU Admin Guide I. Please try and get more disk space rather than catalog archiving.

[MohitK]

Thanks Marianne. I can't get more disk space immediately so in the short term I am looking enabling catalog compression. What compression interval would you recommend? Currently my catalog backup policy has retention of 1 day.

Thanks

MK

[Marianne]

The value you select for catalog compression means that images older than the amount of days will be compressed.

Here you need to make a decision based on the amount of restore requests you receive and for how far back.
If images to be restored are compressed, NBU will first uncompress before you can browse/restore.

So, if restore requests are normally for 7-14 days ago, select 14 days. 
Compression will take place during next Image cleanup job.

In the meantime, look for NBU logs that can be cleaned up.