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19 DR Series Appliance Cleaner Best Practices
D If the cleaner runs behind
When a full cleaner pass runs beyond the 7 days recommended by Dell, the cleaner is considered to be in
cleaning debt. For example, if a full cleaner pass completes in 9 days, the cleaner has 2 days of cleaning
debt and cleaner runtimes need to be immediately increased. Cleaning debt occurs when the DR ingests
more data than can be cleaned. Depending on the rate of cleaner debt accumulation, the DR can quickly
fill up eventually halting backups. When cleaner runtimes are increased, the cleaning debt can be
immediately addressed and eliminated over time.
Follow the cleaner best practices outlined in Section-3 of this document.
Example
Cindy manages backups at a pharmaceutical company which includes multiple remote DR appliances
replicating to a production site. Cindy notices that her production site DR appliance is rapidly and
unexpectedly running out of free space. Since she has not paid attention to the cleaner process in quite
some time, she feels her DR cleaner has fallen behind and is not freeing up disk capacity fast enough.
At her production site, Cindy currently holds a retention policy of 12 weekend full backups and 15 daily
incrementals and her backup schedules are described in the following table.
In this scenario, Cindy will calibrate the production site cleaner schedule such that full cleaner passes
meet Dell’s recommended cleaner completion time of 7 days.
Note: Each of Cindy’s remote sites will require a cleaner schedule inspection as well, but in this scenario,
only the production site cleaner will be examined.
Cindy examines the current state of her production site cleaner by running the following command:
stats --cleaner