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Re: [Networker] Determining when a volume becomes recylable
2008-10-01 18:26:53
Tim Mooney wrote:
In regard to: Re: [Networker] Determining when a volume becomes
recylable,...:
That's only true if there are no savesets that depend on this saveset.
Are you certain that's the case?
I believe so ... can't think what could depend on this particular
saveset.
How can I determine that?
Very carefully. ;-)
I'm not aware of any magic attribute that you can supply in an mminfo
query to easily determine all the savesets that depend on a particular
saveset (now watch, Davina or Darren will point out something obvious that
I'm not thinking of...). There's nothing like
mminfo -q 'depends_on=111223344' -r 'ssid,savetime,level'
What you have to do is look at the level of the backup and the level
of any subsequent backups and do the "what depends on this" calculations
yourself (or via a script).
I've never bothered to write a script to do this kind of thing, but I
don't think it would be terribly difficult.
I think you're right that there's no magic query for this, but at the
same time it's not too difficult to find the dependencies. For example,
if you have a save set called /var for a client called baldrick that you
think should have expired, simply run a query on all instances of that
save set in chronological order. I would run something like:
mminfo -ot -q "name=/var,client=baldrick" -r savetime,level,volume
Work your way back through the save sets and see what depends on earlier
save sets. If you have a full save set that is older than your retention
period, with incrementals in between, these will all need to stay valid
until the next oldest full reaches the retention period.
Sometimes the cause of problems like this could be a failed full backup
somewhere in the cycle, causing earlier backups to hang on longer in
order to correctly preserve the point-in-time recovery ability that
NetWorker does so well. Sometimes it is just a poor understanding of how
this works. It worries me when I hear of people manually recycling
tapes, or setting them to recyclable, they are shortening the
recoverability of their data, sometimes much more than they realise.
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