Davina Treiber wrote:

George Sinclair wrote:

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

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

The reason I ask is because I have a special pool for very specific one-time level full data sets, and I currently have indexing enabled for the pool (the group, too, for that matter). I enabled indexing because I wanted to be able to do a few browsable recovers to test that the data was backed up correctly. The first and only save set written thus far is 1.7 TB, so that's a lot of data to read through to do a save set recover. I also made temporary clones, but my plan is to recycle those clone volumes once the originals are off site. The clones were only created to further ensure that the originals could be read OK. In this regard, perhaps the indexing is moot, but seemed useful.

Unfortunately, these backups are one-time. There will be no further backups of these save sets at any level. As a result, the information in the index may never expire or get removed if there's never any more backups, right? If that's the case, the index might grow bigger than I'd like, 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 to notice appreciable disk shortage following subsequent backups to this pool. I do have a *limited* number of save sets that will be backed up to this pool (maybe 15 more at 1 TB or so each?), and then I'm done, but not sure how much the index will grow as a result, and I'm thinking that with no later backups, that space might just sit there and never get truncated or freed up.

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

I really don't need to keep the index entries around forever, but I would like to be able to have the capability to perform a browsable recovery 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 an older backup of that index, but that's not possible if indexing is turned off on the pool. But if it's turned on then I might end up eating into more disk space than I want. Seems I'm damed if I do, damned if I don't. Any advice?

Very long question with a short answer.

* With indexing turned on at time of backup: index is written for that save set. Browse and retention for that save set is set at the time of the backup.

* Pre-existing save sets are not affected by this setting.

That makes sense. Thanks for corroborating this, however.

* An index for a save set can easily be removed using "nsrmm -o

recoverable -S 123456789". You can trim down the indices for any particular save set in this way. The index can be replaced later by nsrck -L7 or by scanning.

index:client_name cr

* A save set that was written without indexing on can never become browsable unless you scan it. No other way.

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

--
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