Clear old indexes in EMC Networker

Hello - before advising on how to free up space on your Indexes can you tell me what retention period you have for the backups?  Is retention the same for all?  Do you have free space on another file system/Partition?

Regards,

Bill Mason

Hi Bill

Retention and browse periods are both 1 year for both daily and monthly backups.

I have around 14 GB available on the drive where indexes reside.

And a correction to the information I provided earlier :- Full backups happen once a month.

I am currently scanning in few tapes for a saveset that is more then 1 year old as I need to do restore from them.

Luckily they were not overwritten but the indexes have dropped out due to the browse period being 1 year. Thus I have to run "scanner" command for this saveset. There are about 15-16 tapes for this saveset. Thus that is going to add quite a bit to indexes.

The issue I am having at the moment is that the "scanner" command is going really slow. For 1 tape it has taken 4 days (used space on this tape is around 1240 GB). I am thinking that the low free space on indexes drive can be slowing it down. So I wanted to clear the space by removing indexes for daily backup jobs that are older then 30 days.

Also, how can I check the reason for slowness of the scanner command?

And I have 3 tape drives in the library. How can I restrict drive 0 from being used for normal networker operations and just use it for the scanner command?

Hello mc_7,

Ok so firstly - savesets on tape are only lost when the tape is relabeled.  Until all savesets on a tape are recyclable the tape volume is not eligible to be overwritten, so savesets will remain on Media Database until this happens.

Usually Customers don't require long browse periods unless this is Application Data like Exchange/SQL or Oracle where the data backup uses Module software as well as core NetWorker.  In your case I don't know but I suspect that you don't need to keep this detailed information for 1 yr as your proposing to cut to 30 days anyway.  You can change the browse times from the command line on savesets so this would retrospectively set this for historical backups and next time NetWorker server housekeeping runs it would reduce the index size accordingly.

For a restore if your doing full saveset you don't need the details stored in Client File Index anyway as all files will be recovered.  Alternatively you if you don't need all the data you can restore it all and then just pick out what you need and copy to where it is needed.

If you do need the file index details then you can either recreate via using scanner -i command or try to recover the index backup from the NetWorker server for the day or day after for which the client backup was taken - but this depends on how long you keep your index backups for which are part of the bootstrap backup for the server.

As for reserving the tape drive for scanner command - all you need to is mount without load the first tape volume for the saveset, then disable or mark the drive as Read only NW, and then start scanner command.  When your prompted for the next tape if you have disabled you will need to enable, mount without load the next tape and disable again.

If you mark as read-Only as long as you don't start a restore or clone/stage process the tape should be left alone by backup processes.

I am sure you are aware that NW 7.5 is very old and has been out of support for some time (NW 8.2.4 version - the only version still in support go out of support at the end of this year).

Regards,

Bill