[Networker] Turning off indexing on pools

Hi,

If you have indexing turned on for a given pool, and you later turn itoff, will this affect your ability to use nwrecover to recover data thatwas backed up prior to turning it off? Can this setting be turned on andoff without affecting the information that was added to the index whenit was last on?

I wouldn't think so as this just determines whether or not the index isupdated on the server's disk, so the information would still be there,assuming of course that you were still within the browse policy, but anynew data backed up to the pool would not be reflected in the index, sothis could only be recovered via save set recover. But if the feature isthen re-enabled later then subsequent backups will again add informationto the index. That right?

The reason I ask is because I have a special pool for very specificone-time level full data sets, and I currently have indexing enabled forthe pool (the group, too, for that matter). I enabled indexing because Iwanted to be able to do a few browsable recovers to test that the datawas backed up correctly. The first and only save set written thus far is1.7 TB, so that's a lot of data to read through to do a save setrecover. I also made temporary clones, but my plan is to recycle thoseclone volumes once the originals are off site. The clones were onlycreated to further ensure that the originals could be read OK. In thisregard, perhaps the indexing is moot, but seemed useful.

Unfortunately, these backups are one-time. There will be no furtherbackups of these save sets at any level. As a result, the information inthe index may never expire or get removed if there's never any morebackups, right? If that's the case, the index might grow bigger than I'dlike, so it might start to eat into available disk space. As a result,it might be necessary to turn off indexing on the pool if I start tonotice appreciable disk shortage following subsequent backups to thispool. I do have a *limited* number of save sets that will be backed upto this pool (maybe 15 more at 1 TB or so each?), and then I'm done, butnot sure how much the index will grow as a result, and I'm thinking thatwith no later backups, that space might just sit there and never gettruncated or freed up.

The particular NSR client resource that writes to this pool has a browsepolicy of 6months and a retention policy of a Decade. There are otherNSR client resources for this same client that are members of othergroups and write to other pools, so it's not as if this is the onlyclient resource that updates the index.

I really don't need to keep the index entries around forever, but Iwould like to be able to have the capability to perform a browsablerecovery at some point in the future. The only way I know to do that,assuming the entries are no longer still on disk, would be to recover anolder backup of that index, but that's not possible if indexing isturned off on the pool. But if it's turned on then I might end up eatinginto more disk space than I want. Seems I'm damed if I do, damned if Idon't. Any advice?


Thanks.

George

--
George Sinclair
NOAA/NESDIS/National Oceanographic Data Center
SSMC3 E/OC3 Room 4145         | Voice: (301) 713-3284 x210
1315 East West Highway        | Fax:   (301) 713-3301
Silver Spring, MD 20910-3282  | Web Site:  http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/
- Any opinions expressed in this message are NOT those of the US Govt. -

To sign off this list, send email to listserv AT listserv.temple DOT edu and type 
"signoff networker" in the body of the email. Please write to networker-request 
AT listserv.temple DOT edu if you have any problems with this list. You can access the 
archives at http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html or
via RSS at http://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NETWORKER

[Networker] Turning off indexing on pools - need advice?