Summary
Under certain circumstances, the DPX Change Journal condense fails to clean up older change journal files. This results in a continually increasing directory size and causes disk space problems.
Symptoms
Condense jobs fail to query related drives of the Backup Express Change Journal with the following error:
Querying the Change Journal for volume () failed rc(38)
Resolution
The number of files in the DPX SS Journal Depository directory may continually expand which can result in failed querying and condense jobs under the following circumstances:
Infrequent Condense Jobs
When a single DPX Block Backup (Block) job backs up a volume, disk space for the DPX SS Journal Depository will grow if condense jobs are not frequently run. Typically the DPX Change Journal creates disk block allocation information files during each Block backup job to identify changed blocks. These files are deleted during a condense operation and when specific criteria are met. Therefore it is recommended that you run condense jobs frequently to ensure that disk space taken by the DPX Change Journal is managed appropriately.
To immediately clean up the DPX Change Journal use the DPX bexsnapmgr utility to enable or disable any drive's change journal. Details about using this utility can be found in Recommendations for Performing New BEX Advanced Recovery Base Backup Jobs. After following this procedure, the next Block job will run a base backup to reseed the relationship.
A Volume Has Inactive Block Jobs Defined
In this scenario, DPX Change Journal files may accumulate because DPX is unaware of job definitions that have become inactive. Therefore a manual cleanup operation is required. The below procedure explains how to conduct a manual cleanup.
- Open Windows Explorer and go to the DPX SS Journal Depository of the appropriate volume. On the C:/ drive this directory will be C:\SS Journal Depository
- Identify files that have 0 bytes and are named with the following format:
<jobname>.{<32-character-volume-serial-number>}.<10-digit-timestamp>
Where <jobname> is the name of the inactive job definition. - Delete all the files identified in step 2 with inactive job definitions.
- Rerun a condense job.
After deleting all unused job definitions, the condense job will fully remove their marker files and clean up the DPX Change Journal.
Note that Condense jobs will remove the marker files only if the snapshot is ready to be expired from that volume. A decrease in space may not be immediately observed after the condense job if the volume does not have snapshots ready to be expired by the condense process.
As a best practice, Catalogic Software recommends keeping similar names for jobs related to a particular volume. If the use of different job definitions is necessary, perform cleanup operations for jobs that become inactive or deleted. If you do not clean up inactive or deleted jobs properly, the DPX Change Journal will, once again, begin to grow exponentially.