oc-mirror removes operator images from mirror registry that are not referenced in the channel anymore

Environment

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP)
  • 4.10 and above
• oc-mirror

Issue

• Images get pruned from the private registry if the images don't exist in the catalog anymore when performing mirroring with oc-mirror.
• How to prevent oc-mirror from removing images from mirror registry?

Resolution

• This was reported in the bug This content is not included.OCPBUGS-863.
• There is a new flag now --skip-pruning that was released with oc-mirror 4.12.11. This flag can be used to avoid pruning of images in the mirror registry by oc-mirror.

Root Cause

oc-mirror is designed to prune any images from the target mirror registry that were excluded from the image set configuration since the previous execution. When the images don't exist in the catalog anymore, they are considered excluded and get pruned from the mirror registry.

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