On 01/27 02:23 , Timothy J. Massey wrote: > We are right now envisioning needing 2TB of space to back up a single > host: our mail server, which has less than 100GB of data. The deltas > on our mail server are currently in the neighborhood of 50GB/day. > That's because we have 50GB of mail data, and we all receive at least > one mail a day.
I don't know what kind of mailserver you have, but I would *strongly* suggest that if you're using a Linux mailserver, that you go to 'maildir' format for your mailboxes. In case you're not familiar with it: the normal 'mbox' format is just a concatenation of all the mail messages in one big file. every new mail message just gets appended onto the end of the mbox. maildir format uses directories and subdirectories full of little files, one for each mail message. this is important for backups, since only the new files get transferred. it did a world of good for backuppc when we converted an old mailserver over to maildir format. I haven't done the math on it; but I'm fairly sure it halved the backup time, and maybe quite a bit better. the downside of maildir is that it takes longer to read the mailbox, since there are more disk head seeks. this is balanced out by the reduced memory requirements tho... you no longer have to hold the entirety of each user's mbox in memory when they're connected with IMAP. (when you're dealing with people who steadfastly refuse to clean up their mailbox, this gets to be a problem). -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
