I've been trying to submit a support request regarding this problem, but none of the methods on the Contact Support page on support.quest.com seem to actually work, so I'm going to put this here instead.
We have numerous NetVault jobs that backup to a server with NetVault SmartDisk installed. Our SmartDisk license does not include deduplication. Recently, the SmartDisk server ran out of free space, causing the backup jobs that use it to stall. In order to resolve this, over a week ago I removed a hundred or so unneeded savesets and checked the "Force Immediate Removal" option when doing so. However, the space taken up by those savesets has never been freed up, causing the SmartDisk to still report as being full. It appears that the garbage collection process is never running to free up the space taken by those removed savesets.
In troubleshooting this, I noticed that the SmartDisk reports as having "Deduplication Queue Length: 4616", which I believe means that it has queued entries for deduplication. Since we aren't licensed for deduplication, it never runs the deduplication process. As far as I can tell, this is what's causing the garbage collection process to never run, as it's waiting for deduplication to finish, which will never happen.
I have used the "smartdisk" CLI tool to forcibly do the following:
- Enable garbage collection
- Set the dedupe window to Never
- Set the gc window to Anytime
- Disable deduplication
- Disable garbage collection
None of which ever resulted in garbage collection finally running, I'm guessing because none of those options clears out the deduplication queue.
Is there some way I can clear the deduplication queue, or force garbage collection to run?