Can you tell me what are the Best Practices for maintaining and carrying out house-keeping on the Index files ?

I am assuming here you are running some version of NW 9.x

NetWorker will automatically housekeep the indexes for clients providing you are running the server protection policy (which secures the bootstrap/index information equivelent to bootstrap backup at version 8).  If you are not running this policy then enable and see if space is reduced post successful run.

There was a change in NW 9.x where browse time was effectively removed (as it was no longer able to be set to a value less then retention time), so index size can increase when running newer versions as opposed to older pre 9.x versions.

Going forwards there are two options: -

1.  You can direct index for clients to be stored at an alternative location where more space is available (either for all or some clients) within the environment.

2.  You can look at how long the backups are retained for and lower the retention for some clients.  This will not apply to all current backups but will take effect on backups taken post the change so Index entries are not held for as long a period of time and hence will not take up as much space.

Hi,

Many thanks. We are running v8.

Hello,

NetWorker 8.x runs index backup and cleaning automatically, by default there is no need to do something manually.

Regards

Lukas

Hello, OK on NW version 8 the housekeeping runs every 23 hrs be default.  You will see a file called nsrim.prv file under nsr/mm directory - this will be time stamped the last time the housekeeping was run.

You should see entries in the daemon.log file when groups finished saying nsrim ran recently - skipping until it is after 23 hrs.  Then it will run and clean up everything for savesets and media.

If the file is not present it should be created automatically but you can touch/create a file of that name also.

Some Customers like to run the housekeeping the same time each day as automatically it runs 1 hr sooner each day and can work its way into the backup window/busy times which can cause issues.  There are Knowledge Base articles in Support on how to do this and also nsrim behaviour - just search for the nsrim.prv name to view from your Support portal.

I hope this clarifies the situation for you.

Regards,

Bill