If you are keeping your system up to date with Patchsets, Patch Bundles, Merge Label Requests (MLR) or Critical Patch Updates (CPU), you will most likely suffer from a huge .patch_storage Subdirectory in your $ORACLE_HOME.<\/p>\n
On one of my databases it looked like this:<\/p>\n
Space used by $ORACLE_HOME: 7 GB
\nSpace used by $ORACLE_HOME\/.patch_storage: 4.3 GB<\/p>\n
Can data in this directory be removed?<\/p>\n
MetaLink Note 550522.1 (Subject: How To Avoid Disk Full Issues Because OPatch Backups Take Big Amount Of Disk Space.) has the answer and tells you: it depends. Normally, this data is used in order to be able to rollback a patch. However, if you have installed a patchset (eg. 10.2.0.4), then the patches for the previous patchset (10.2.0.3) which are located in the .patch_storage directory are not needed anymore and can be removed. However, I would not recommend that you delete the directories manually yourself, as this would not be supported. Instead let Oracle do it for you:<\/p>\n
Recent versions of opatch (current is 10.2.0.4.5 as of January 2009) have a utility included, which removes patches not needed anymore from the .patch_storage directory. Moreover, the opatch utility creates these .patch_storage backup directories more intelligently which should result in less space wasted.<\/strong><\/p>\n [oracle@vmhost1 ora10]$.\/OPatch\/opatch util Cleanup Oracle Interim Patch Installer version 10.2.0.4.5 UTIL session<\/p>\n Oracle Home : \/oracle\/ora10 Patch history file: \/oracle\/ora10\/cfgtoollogs\/opatch\/opatch_history.txt<\/p>\n Invoking utility “cleanup” UtilSession: Backup area for restore has been cleaned up. For a complete list of files\/directories OPatch succeeded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 180 MB instead of 4 GB. I like that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you are keeping your system up to date with Patchsets, Patch Bundles, Merge Label Requests (MLR) or Critical Patch Updates (CPU), you will most likely suffer from a huge .patch_storage Subdirectory in your $ORACLE_HOME. On one of my databases it looked like this: Space used by $ORACLE_HOME: 7 GB Space used by $ORACLE_HOME\/.patch_storage: 4.3 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,19,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10g","category-11g","category-metalink","category-oracle-database"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ora-solutions.net\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nInvoking OPatch 10.2.0.4.5<\/p>\n
\nCopyright (c) 2008, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n
\nCentral Inventory : \/oracle\/oraInventory
\n from : \/var\/opt\/oracle\/oraInst.loc
\nOPatch version : 10.2.0.4.5
\nOUI version : 10.2.0.4.0
\nOUI location : \/oracle\/ora10\/oui
\nLog file location : \/oracle\/ora10\/cfgtoollogs\/opatch\/opatch2009-01-15_17-00-51PM.log<\/p>\n
\nOPatch will clean up ‘restore.sh,make.txt’ files and ‘rac,scratch,backup’ directories.
\nYou will be still able to rollback patches after this cleanup.
\nDo you want to proceed? [y|n]
\ny
\nUser Responded with: Y
\nSize of directory “\/oracle\/ora10\/.patch_storage” before cleanup is 4575330012 bytes.
\nSize of directory “\/oracle\/ora10\/.patch_storage” after cleanup is 188326505 bytes.<\/p>\n
\ndeleted, Please refer log file.<\/p>\n