Advise on best way to clean up disk space on the Networker server itself

SO my NW server's data drive, where my NW is installed, is running out of
disk space. I've had that happen before, and it ain't pretty. So I need to
clean up some space. And the NW installation is the only thing installed
on this drive, so all the space is being taken up by NW.

Specifically, the largest sub-folder is the "index" drive, which stands to
reason. It's 780G at the moment. (wow!) The next largest folder is the
logs folder, at 13G. For example, my clients with the largest number of
small files take up the most index space (82G,68G,a couple at 32G).

So what I need to do is reduce the sized of the index folder. And how
exactly does one do that? I recall something about "nsrim -l" to remove
that oldest full backup, but that's seems to be very last resort. I have
run "nsrim -X", doesn't help enough.

I'm guessing I need to change retention dates on savesets. But how best to
go about that? I change the browse and retention dates on the month end
backups to be like 7 years, and all other savesets are either 30 or 60
days.

What is the advice of the group? (I'm running on Win 2008 R2, BTW, and NW
8.2.4.3)


--
Michael Leone
Network Administrator, ISM
Philadelphia Housing Authority
1800 South 32nd Street
Phila, PA 19145
Tel: 215-684-4180
Cell: 215-252-0143
<mailto:michael.leone@pha.phila.gov>




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The advice?


I would simply add disk space. Of course it's so much easier when the NW server is virtual. You didn't say if you're on real hardware or virtual, though.


--
Atro Tossavainen
System Administrator (Consultant)
Oy GTECH Finland Ab, a fully owned subsidiary of IGT plc
tel. +358-44-5000-600 (cell)
________________________________
From: EMC Data Protection Q & A <EMC-DATAPROTECTION-L@LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU> on behalf of Michael Leone <Michael.Leone@PHA.PHILA.GOV>
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2017 4:28:54 PM
To: EMC-DATAPROTECTION-L@LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU
Subject: [EMC-DataProtection-L] Advise on best way to clean up disk space on the Networker server itself

SO my NW server's data drive, where my NW is installed, is running out of disk space. I've had that happen before, and it ain't pretty. So I need to clean up some space. And the NW installation is the only thing installed on this drive, so all the space is being taken up by NW.

Specifically, the largest sub-folder is the "index" drive, which stands to reason. It's 780G at the moment. (wow!) The next largest folder is the logs folder, at 13G. For example, my clients with the largest number of small files take up the most index space (82G,68G,a couple at 32G).

So what I need to do is reduce the sized of the index folder. And how exactly does one do that? I recall something about "nsrim -l" to remove that oldest full backup, but that's seems to be very last resort. I have run "nsrim -X", doesn't help enough.

I'm guessing I need to change retention dates on savesets. But how best to go about that? I change the browse and retention dates on the month end backups to be like 7 years, and all other savesets are either 30 or 60 days.

What is the advice of the group? (I'm running on Win 2008 R2, BTW, and NW 8..2.4.3)


--
Michael Leone
Network Administrator, ISM
Philadelphia Housing Authority
1800 South 32nd Street
Phila, PA 19145
Tel: 215-684-4180
Cell: 215-252-0143
<mailto:michael.leone@pha.phila.gov>



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> The advice?
>
> I would simply add disk space. Of course it's so much easier when
> the NW server is virtual. You didn't say if you're on real hardware
> or virtual, though.


If I could simply add disk space to the server, I wouldn't have asked for
advice on how to reduce the folder size. LOL

No, it's a physical server, and there are no empty drive slots to add disk
space (it does not use SAN space for storage, everything is locally
saved).


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Hi Mike,

Several things you need to review. The index directory/folder size, this
is a direct relationship to your Browse Policy. The longer your browse
window the larger your index folder per client. Another thing to look at
is for retired/decomm'd clients. Over the years you may have retired
clients and probably deleted from the NetWorker interface. But the client
entry remains in ../nsr/index. you will manually need to remove or
relocate yourself once a client is removed from NetWorker.

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 9:28 AM, Michael Leone <Michael.Leone@pha.phila.gov>
wrote:

> SO my NW server's data drive, where my NW is installed, is running out of
> disk space. I've had that happen before, and it ain't pretty. So I need to
> clean up some space. And the NW installation is the only thing installed on
> this drive, so all the space is being taken up by NW.
>
> Specifically, the largest sub-folder is the "index" drive, which stands to
> reason. It's 780G at the moment. (wow!) The next largest folder is the logs
> folder, at 13G. For example, my clients with the largest number of small
> files take up the most index space (82G,68G,a couple at 32G).
>
> So what I need to do is reduce the sized of the index folder. And how
> exactly does one do that? I recall something about "nsrim -l" to remove
> that oldest full backup, but that's seems to be very last resort. I have
> run "nsrim -X", doesn't help enough.
>
> I'm guessing I need to change retention dates on savesets. But how best to
> go about that? I change the browse and retention dates on the month end
> backups to be like 7 years, and all other savesets are either 30 or 60
> days.
>
> What is the advice of the group? (I'm running on Win 2008 R2, BTW, and NW
> 8.2.4.3)
>
>
> --
> Michael Leone
> Network Administrator, ISM
> Philadelphia Housing Authority
> 1800 South 32nd Street
> Phila, PA 19145
> Tel: 215-684-4180 <(215)%20684-4180>
> Cell: 215-252-0143 <(215)%20252-0143>
> <mailto:michael.leone@pha.phila.gov <michael.leone@pha.phila.gov>>
>
>
> -- This list is hosted as a public service at Temple University by Stan
> Horwitz If you wish to sign off this list or adjust your subscription
> settings, please do so via http://listserv.temple.edu/
> archives/emc-dataprotection-l.html If you have any questions regarding
> management of this list, please send email to owner-emc-dataprotection-l@
> listserv.temple.edu
>


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In regard to: [EMC-DataProtection-L] Advise on best way to clean up disk...:

> Specifically, the largest sub-folder is the "index" drive, which stands to
> reason. It's 780G at the moment. (wow!) The next largest folder is the
> logs folder, at 13G. For example, my clients with the largest number of
> small files take up the most index space (82G,68G,a couple at 32G).

If you're in dire need right now, doing a restart of NetWorker should
get it to start writing to new log files, at which point the old log
files could be compressed/moved/removed depending on your environment's
requirements.

> I'm guessing I need to change retention dates on savesets. But how best to
> go about that? I change the browse and retention dates on the month end
> backups to be like 7 years, and all other savesets are either 30 or 60
> days.

Your client indexes are big because of your browse policy.

Your retention policy has much less impact on (on-disk) data size, and
primarily relates to the media database.

If you want to reduce how much space you're using, you need to make less
data browseable. As long as you don't change the retention, NetWorker
will still keep the data, it just won't be as easy to get back. You'll
have to load the old index (nsrck -L7) or use scanner to rebuild a
particular client's index if you need to selectively restore files.

Do you clone? If so, what gets cloned?

Are your business requirements that you need to be able to easily &
quickly recover data from a backup that's 7 years old, or do you only
need to be able to recover it with a little bit of work (scanning or
loading an old copy of an index?)

Do you frequently have to spot-recover data from backups from 7 years ago?
Do you have a particular recovery time objective (RTO) for your oldest
data? If you need to keep it 7 years but you rarely or almost never need
to actually recover it *and* it's OK if it takes longer to recover than
your recent backups, then you have optimum conditions for purging the
client indexes of the old files.

If you can purge the oldest browseable bits from some of your clients,
you would do that with a combination of mminfo, nsrmm, and nsrim. mminfo
to identify the oldest savesets for a particular client, nsrmm to change
(just the!) browse period for that client, and nsrim to force index
cleanup once the browse period has changed.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney Tim.Mooney@ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure 701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, Quentin Burdick Building 701-231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164


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On 17/07/17 14:28, Michael Leone wrote:

>
> The next largest folder is the logs folder, at 13G.

You don't need 13GB of logs.


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> > The next largest folder is the logs folder, at 13G.
>
> You don't need 13GB of logs.

No kidding. LOL But my "messages" file by itself is 1.1G. And I don't know
enough about the other contents of that folder (clone, policy, sg, etc) to
know what to delete ..


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> > Specifically, the largest sub-folder is the "index" drive, which
stands to
> > reason. It's 780G at the moment. (wow!) The next largest folder is the
> > logs folder, at 13G. For example, my clients with the largest number
of
> > small files take up the most index space (82G,68G,a couple at 32G).
>
> If you're in dire need right now, doing a restart of NetWorker should
> get it to start writing to new log files, at which point the old log
> files could be compressed/moved/removed depending on your environment's
> requirements.

In the logs folder, the sg sub-folder is 11G. How do I clear that, without
stopping the server? My server is busy almost all the time, either
actually doing backups (evening), or cloning those backups to tape (during
the day).

I mean, if I have to stop it temporarily yo clean up, and then restart the
cloning, I can do that ...

> > I'm guessing I need to change retention dates on savesets. But how
best to
> > go about that? I change the browse and retention dates on the month
end
> > backups to be like 7 years, and all other savesets are either 30 or
60
> > days.
>
> Your client indexes are big because of your browse policy.

Currently, all clients are set to 30 days browse and retention. Individual
savesets (i.e., EOM) are set for a 7 year browse/retention, via a script I
wrote many moons ago ..

> If you want to reduce how much space you're using, you need to make less
> data browseable. As long as you don't change the retention, NetWorker
> will still keep the data, it just won't be as easy to get back. You'll
> have to load the old index (nsrck -L7) or use scanner to rebuild a
> particular client's index if you need to selectively restore files.

Yeah, I've done that before, I know that drill. I usually nsrck -L7 for
the CFI itself (save with a "savegrp -O full" everyday), change the browse
time, then go on from there.

> Do you clone? If so, what gets cloned?

Yes. And everything. LOL ... yes, literally. All backups write directly to
a Data Domain. In turn, we then run clone jobs to clone that data to tape.
A different clone job clones the Data Domain to a 2nd Data Domain, at a
different site, for DR purposes.

> Are your business requirements that you need to be able to easily &
> quickly recover data from a backup that's 7 years old, or do you only
> need to be able to recover it with a little bit of work (scanning or
> loading an old copy of an index?)
>
> Do you frequently have to spot-recover data from backups from 7 years
ago?

Frequently? No. Have I had such requests in the past? Oh, yes.

> Do you have a particular recovery time objective (RTO) for your oldest
> data? If you need to keep it 7 years but you rarely or almost never
need
> to actually recover it *and* it's OK if it takes longer to recover than
> your recent backups, then you have optimum conditions for purging the
> client indexes of the old files.
>
> If you can purge the oldest browseable bits from some of your clients,
> you would do that with a combination of mminfo, nsrmm, and nsrim. mminfo
> to identify the oldest savesets for a particular client, nsrmm to change
> (just the!) browse period for that client, and nsrim to force index
> cleanup once the browse period has changed.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Lot of manual work, identifying which
savesets to change the browse time on, then piping that info over to
nsrmm, to reduce it.

I've done that before, I was hoping for something a bit less tedious on my
part. :-)


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I don't remember if you said you are running Linux/Unix or Windows, but in Linux you can:


1) Copy the log to some other location

2) cp /dev/null logfile_name

This will clear the log without interrupting the writing process.



From: EMC Data Protection Q & A [mailto:EMC-DATAPROTECTION-L@LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael Leone
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2017 10:00 AM
To: EMC-DATAPROTECTION-L@LISTSERV.TEMPLE.EDU
Subject: Re: [EMC-DataProtection-L] Advise on best way to clean up disk space on the Networker server itself

> > The next largest folder is the logs folder, at 13G.
>
> You don't need 13GB of logs.

No kidding. LOL But my "messages" file by itself is 1.1G. And I don't know enough about the other contents of that folder (clone, policy, sg, etc) to know what to delete ..

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> I don’t remember if you said you are running Linux/Unix or Windows,
> but in Linux you can:
>
> 1) Copy the log to some other location
> 2) cp /dev/null logfile_name
>
> This will clear the log without interrupting the writing process.

No, this is on Windows. And I don't have other locations to move anything
to, hence the need to clean up the existing disk structure.

I've started changing the browse time on some older retained savesets, to
expire them while still retaining them. I think that should clean up some
space in the index folder. It's just a bit time consuming.


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