Cannot Compact Mailfiles if using Transaction Logging?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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If you have Transaction Logging enabled to allow your backup software to do incremental backups of your databases/mailfiles…

How do you reclaim diskspace on a server by compacting mailfiles?

The Lotus Recommended “Compact -b” is transaction logging friendly, but only reorders the whitespace…it does not reduce the mailfile size (ie reclaim the whitespace)

If you do any other type of compact it changes the DBID of the db which means it won’t be an incremental backup.

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So basically you can’t do incremental backups in Notes while still keeping your mailfiles compacted. That can’t be right.

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Hope this makes sense.

Not seeing any technotes or Forum postings on this makes me think that not many people are doing incremental backups.

Stuart

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Subject: compact before backup

Schedule the compact just before a backup.

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Subject: RE: compact before backup

That sounds like a lot of finger-crossing that the compact finishes.

We have terabytes of data on one server…compacting sometimes takes many, many hours.

Should Lotus have a compact solution that retains DBID?

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Subject: RE: compact before backup

You’re asking for 2 conflicting/competing objectives here, i.e. a) being able to change the physical layout of the db (to reclaim whitespace) and b) being able to rollback to a previous version (via restores of TXN points). TXNs are tightly coupled to the physical layout of the DB (via the DBID). If the physical layout changes, the DBID has to be invalidated, otherwise the existing TXNs would mess up the (now changed) db. So yes, it would be nice to be able to do this, but with the current implemention it is not possible.

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Subject: Cannot Compact Mailfiles if using Transaction Logging?

Hi Stuart.We suffered through a similar issue related to having transaction logging and quotas. We do compact -B twice a week right before the incremental (With Tivoli/TDP, this is a backup of all DBIID changed files) takes place. So we have 2 snapshots a week, the rest is just logs.

On the other side of the coin, users will hit the compact button all day long and never get back any space when TL is enabled. I developed a workaround for that too, but its more complex than I can describe here. Look for the January 04 issue of The View for more details.

RT

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Subject: Cannot Compact Mailfiles if using Transaction Logging?

You missed an essential point. The command is NOT ‘compact -b’ but rather ‘compact -B’. The capitalization is important, and is what reduces the database size.

Have fun.

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Subject: RE: Cannot Compact Mailfiles if using Transaction Logging?

Hi Timothy,Actually you missed my essential point.

The -B command, does reduce size, but changes the DBIID on the db thus not allowing an incremental backup to occur.

I was looking for a way to compact db’s without a new DBIID being assigned to a db. However, I guess this isn’t possible.

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On a side notes…Lotus has always been very confused about their own Compaction abilities (such as allowing user access when compacting…which is impossible), so I tend to trust real world people posting here, rather than Lotus’ Help/Admin documentation.