typical size of catalog

[daFranze]

my catalog backup takes plenty of time, about 30 Minutes.
Ich recently doublechecked the size of
C:\Program Files\VERITAS\NetBackup\db\images
which is about 13 Gigabytes for 70 clients listed in this directory, only about 30% of these clients are still active clients. Can I clean up this area (burn the catalog eg on CD for future reference) to speed up catalog backups?
What's your typical size of catalog
We aere backing up 1ce a week full backups (retention 4 Weeks and zwo hosts for 8 Weeks), dayly cumulative incrementals and once a month a fullbackup (retention ininity)
I know the size depends on the number of files backed up, but I still think it's a lot of data and a slow backup...

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage

 

[OHWS]

My catalog is around 20gig for around 55 clients. I would not recommend cleaning up the catalog. You will still see the directory for the images for the inactive clients but those images should expire with the retention of the backups and the space used by these directories would eventually be next to nothing. I also have client areas that are now inactive and do not plan on cleaning anything up as far as the catalog is concerned. Hopefully you will get some other opinions as well to either strengthen or weaken the case for this advice!!

 

[comtec17]

The first problem you are facing is the fact that your montly and incrementals are retained forever. This will create a very large catalog very fast. DO NOT move active images around as this will cause catalog corruption.

In the admin guide there is a mathmatical equation that will help you size your catalog, but the more data you retain, the larger you catalog will grow. Since you are using "infinity" you catalog will never stop growing.

 

[xxx01]

Yes, the retention "infinity" does not help in reducing the catalog size. we have about 700 official clients and our image directory is at about 80GB. We do backup a lot of stuff that's probably not necessary. However, we did find a few months ago that the catalog backup was not going through its cleanup process and thus this directory grew to a whopping 140GB. Even though a case was opened and a touchfile was added, i'm still finding that i have to run the bpimage -cleanup once every few weeks. It's something you can maybe look in to but i doubt this is your case, since your retentions are infinity.

If you do searches for disaster recovery on this site and the veritas site, you'll find some suggestions on large catalogs. You can just specify in the catalog backup configurations to backup only the image\clients you want.

 

[birky]

May be worth setting catalog compression as you have a lot of clients that aren't active anymore but, you are still retaining the data.

PinnacleData Systems (UK)

 

[ronnheden]

If you enable catalog compression, your catalog backup will take even longer time to complete.

//Ronnheden

 

[daFranze]

Thank you guys for your opinions! Think I will let the catalog as is...

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage

 

[Vela]

We have close to 500 client's plus alot of 1-5 Terabyte databases-

Our catalog is 700+Gig

We were required to keep everything during litigation. Currently we have 400G of Exchange mail backups!

Lesson to be learned-
Do not set anything to infinity if you don't have to.

Cleanup is a bi#@!

 

[AquaTeenFryMan]

How often does bpimage -cleanup run? Does it run after each catalog backup?