Manually clearing old data directly from DDOS

Question

Hello all, I'm in a situation where my datadomain is nearing max capacity, and I need to clear data from it. There should be no data on our datadomains older that 50 days, which is the policy for our data.  I ran a command that EMC sent me, I sent the results to them, and they sent me a CSV file, that contains a listing of all images on our datadomain. I sorted by the Unix Mtime, and was able to view all files older than 50 days. There are TONS of them....around 144,000. My backup applications dont show these images, so i cannot expire or delete them from there. But, the majority of the files were written by RMAN, which i do not have access to anyway. I spoke with our oracle DBA, and he said he does not see the files either. So, he is looking into why Rman is not expiring images after the 50 day mark, but I need to know exactly how to directly remove unneeded images through the DD interface. I have full rights to our datadomain. Its just that through my research, I see nothing online about how to do this. This is a dd7200 running DDOS 5.4.4.3. I can enter se mode, shell-escape....whatever is needed. I'm aware that there are risks but cleanup is urgent. I do have an SR already open with EMC, but they are bit slow to respond, and have sent my case over to the 'file system' team. Please let me know if there is other info i can provide. Thank you! Todd

richbinstead · Accepted Answer

Hi Toddman214,

Just to expand upon what dynamo says. This is possible without supports intervention.

You can either:

- Create an NFS share for the Mtree's in question, from the DataDomain system to an NFS client and use the list of files you have received as a reference to which files/directories to delete.

or

- Create a CIFS share for the Mtree's in questions and perform the same task as above, albeit from a CIFS client.

Once the files/directories have been removed/deleted, you will need to run a clean to free up any disk space that the deleted files/directories were using. Once cleaning reaches the copy phase (which is either phase 9 or 11, depending upon your DDOS release), this is when the actual disk space will be freed and seen via the DDOS 'df' output.

If you have the SR reference, I can look it up and ensure the priority is set accordingly.

Also if you do pursue this via the SR, you will need to explicitly identify which files require deletion and sign a waiver confirming you are happy for EMC to delete the files/directories. This deletion procedure can then be performed in support mode directly on the DataDomain system itself.

cheers, Rich.

dynamox · Answer

export /backup via NFS and clean up from a Linux box.

Toddman214 · Answer

Thanks, both of you! Not sure why I did not think of doing that, but it happens sometimes. Took all of about 30 seconds to access the needed data. Much appreciated!

Data Domain

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