Are you then dumping these files to tape? Otherwise, just having another copy on disk doesn't protect against many potential causes of data loss.My last thing to do prior to converting to production is a backup strategy. I have been doing this with tar something like:
tar -C /var/lib -czf lib-<date>.tar.gz imap tar -C /var/spool -czf spool-<date>.tar.gz imap tar -cf cyrus-<date>.tar
This is producing a pretty big file(s):
lib-<date>.tar.gz -> 2.2M spool-<date>.tar.gz -> 11.0M
and ultimately
cyrus-<date>.tar -> 13.5M
and I was thinking maybe there is a better way that someone else has come up with. Anyone doing backups a different way?
We just backup the mail files normally with Veritas Netbackup (be sure to disable true image restore with the millions of files), with the only custom bit being to dump a copy of the mailbox list to a text file before the backups run (this is a precaution since we are backing up structured database files without synchronization with the program writing them, so there is no guarantee the resulting backup is useful). Our full backup for all Cyrus files is 98G and 4.2M files, taking 5-8 hours depending on other data hitting the tape drives. Daily incremental backups average 1-3G and 10-30k files.
-- John A. Tamplin Unix System Administrator Emory University, School of Public Health +1 404/727-9931
