Archiving the catalog and restoring from the catalog archive
Catalog archiving helps administrators solve the kinds of problems that large amounts of catalog data can pose: large catalogs require a greater amount of disk space and can be time-consuming to back up.
Catalog archiving reduces the size of online catalog data by relocating the large catalog .f files (files files) to secondary storage. NetBackup administration continues to require regularly scheduled catalog backups, but the backups are faster without the large amount of online catalog data.
You can also use intelligent catalog archiving (ICA) to reduce the number of catalog .f files from secondary storage. When you enable ICA, any catalog .f file that is older than the specified retention period value is removed from the catalog disk. You can also specify a size value so that any catalog .f file that is greater than or equal to the size value is removed from the catalog disk.
See Enabling intelligent catalog archiving (ICA) to reduce the number of .f files.
Catalog archiving should not be used as a method to reclaim disk space when a catalog file system fills up. In that situation, investigate catalog compression or add disk space to grow the file system.
For additional catalog archiving considerations, see the following topic:
See Catalog archiving considerations.
To archive the catalog and restore the catalog archive
- Use bpcatlist to determine what images are available to be archived.
Running bpcatlist alone does not modify any catalog images. Only when the bpcatlist output is piped to bpcatarc are the .f files backed up, and only when the output is piped to bpcatrm will the .f files be deleted from disk.
To determine what images have .f files on disk that can be archived, run the following command. The catarcid column indicates whether the .f file is not currently backed up (0) or the catarcid of the backup of that image.
/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpcatlist -online
To determine what images have been previously archived and removed from disk, run the following command.
/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpcatlist -offline
The catalog commands are described in detail in the following topic:
See Catalog archiving commands.
Note:
If catalog archiving has not been previously run, this command should return: No entity was found.
For example, to display all images for a specific client before January 1, 2017, run the following command:
bpcatlist -client name -before Jan 1 2017
To display the help for the bpcatlist command run this command.
bpcatlist -help
Once the bpcatlist output correctly lists all the images that are to be archived or deleted, other commands can be added.
- Running the catalog archive.
Before running the catalog archive, create a backup policy named catarc. The policy is required for the bpcatarc command to successfully process images. The name of the policy reflects that the purpose of the schedule is for catalog archiving.
See the following topic for details about configuring the catarc policy:
To run the catalog archive, first run the bpcatlist command with the same options used in step 1 to display images. Then pipe the output through bpcatarc and bpcatrm.
bpcatlist -client all -before Jan 1 2017 | bpcatarc | bpcatrm
A new job appears in the Activity Monitor. The command waits until the backup completes before it returns the prompt. The command reports an error only if the catalog archive fails, otherwise the commands return to the prompt.
The File List: section of the Job Details in the Activity Monitor displays a list of image files that have been processed. When the job completes with a status 0, the bpcatrm command removes the corresponding .f files. If the job fails, no catalog .f files are removed.
If bpcatlist is piped to bpcatarc but the results are not piped to bpcatrm, the backup occurs but the .f files are not removed from disk. The same bpcatlist command can then be rerun and piped to bpcatrm to remove the .f files.
- Restoring the catalog archive.
To restore the catalog archive, first use the bpcatlist command to list the files that need to be restored. Once bpcatlist displays the proper files to restore, run the bpcatres command to restore the actual files.
To restore all the archived files from step 2, run the following command:
bpcatlist -client all -before Jan 1 2017 | bpcatres
This command restores all of the catalog archive files before January 1, 2017.
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