This answer can help but not a good practice.
You need to have a lot of local diskspace or ask someone to take a backup of this on a tape drive.
Can I just delete the .data files under /archive after stopping EPAgent on a collector ?
I don't care if I miss some historical data.
I have this document but it seems that there is not suggestion to do it only on one collector and then start the Enterprise Manager. (Certainly I can stop the collector before I delete data there.)
Why do you have an EPA on your EMs?
Have you ensured you have enough memory and CPU overhead available? Have you ensured you're not causing resource contention between the EM and EPA?
I apologize if I said that I have EPA on EM.
They are different in this case.
Let me clarify my question.
I don't see any overhead if resources are concerned.
I just want to delete .data files under Introscope10.5.1.8/data/archive
Again, I don't need any backup of those files.
This doc is pretty suggesting to take a back up which is not possible on my local disk.
How to clean up the SmartStor database
I went ahead and stopped Introscope process on collector and cleaned .data files under /archive.
Restarted Introscope process.
All good.