Issues with shortening browse policy 1

[xtrac]

Howdy Folks,

The index size's are getting big here, and I've just discovered that the browse and retention policy are both 1 year, I would like to initially change the browse policy to be 6 months in the hope that it will roughly halve the index file size on a few of the clients. Is there any issues with doing this? The backup cycle is 1 week, (every friday), on another note what should the browse policy be for a backup cycle of 1 week?

Regards

Roy

 

[mgdaviso]

NO issues that I am aware of, The browse policy should be set to however long you need to browse for recovery on-line. That is a descision only you can make based on your requirements.
As a suggestion, if you are backing up data for example that needs to be only retained for 1 month then there is no point in setting the browse/retention policy for more than 1 month. Just remember that once the browse policy has expired, you can only recover your data by scanning the index entries off tape. The data will be on tape until the retention period expires (1 year) so you won't lose any data, just the ability to recover online. I think I got that right.

If your indexes are getting big, you need to sit down and work out what to backup and when, and how long you need to keep the backed up data for. Mike davison
mike.davison@avon.com

 

[lesb]

Another thing you can do is to copy the entire index for a client (obviously a large client) out to another location and then delete and recreate the index for that client.
Another problem I have found with changing browse/retention times was that after you do it, you need to run "nsrck -C" from within the index directory to reset all indexes for the clients.
Les lesb - SUN SysAdmin

 

[wilsona]

There are bugs in versions of the software, however, which result in space not being reclaimed in your indexes for a period twice that of your longest cycle. So, if you have a yearly cycle, your indexes will grow for two years. You will not get anything back unless you remove the offending cycle. You can relabel and reuse the tapes, but the index entries will stay. Browse and retention periods are ignored. Believe me, I know. We have around 20Gb (yes 20 Gigabytes) of indexes here... I would be very interested in finding out the earliest version of the software in which this has been fixed.