ARCserve database maintenance

In a departure from my normal material I'm going to put some stuff here about backup software. This is because I've had a very frustrating time with my backup server and the Internet seems devoid of helpful clues. I've tried google, altavista, yahoo, ask jeeves and even technorati; but got zero results for ca_db_maintenance. So, robot crawlers - do your stuff.

We have ARCserve for Linux r11.5

The backup database is supposed to be maintained by jobs which Prune and Purge old records. I remember this happening when I had ARCserve on NetWare (the good old days) or even on Windows, but in Linux I can't even see the Prune/Purge jobs in the Job Status Manager, which is probably why our database filled up all the available hard disc space in less than 12 months.

If this has happened to you, dear reader, then see the CA tech note ref TEC324615, which describes how to copy the data out of a huge database, destroy the database, then create a new one and copy the data back in. this does work but is pretty fiddly.

But how to get the database to trim itself down automatically?

You can use the Generic Job Manager to run a statistics update (ca_dbadmin –maintain –type statistics) and this is supposed to let ARCserve see what parts of the database are no longer needed. When you run the maintenance task after this (ca_dbadmin –maintain –entity details) then the old stuff is removed, the database is compacted, and your disc space is freed up.

But, to run the maintenance task the caqd and cadbd tasks need to be stopped, and as far as I know you cannot run a job which stops these daemons, because the daemons won't stop if a job is running - even if the running job is only trying to stop them. Anyway, the ca_db_maintenance script doesn't need these tasks to be stopped, I know because I've run it from a command prompt

ca_db_maintenance -retry 1 -interval 1

(I know the Admin Guide has different syntax, but mine works and theirs doesn't)

But can I run it from the Generic Job Manager? No. The exact same command works from a command prompt but not from the GJM. Well I'm stumped and I've opened a support call with CA. If I get something good from them I'll update or post a comment here. If you know what I should do please get in touch. I could use cron but I want all my ARCserve tasks to be in the same scheduler, otherwise I'll get confused when I make changes in the future.

UPDATE:- Nadia from CA has figured it out, the syntax in the Admin Guide is wrong, and so is my guess. It should be

ca_db_maintenance -repeat 1 -interval 1

Nadia is brilliant.