On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 12:11, Igor Brezac wrote: > On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, pnelson wrote: > > > On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 11:29, John Alton Tamplin wrote: > > > pnelson wrote: > > > > > > >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? > > > > > > > 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. > > > > Yes dumping to removable medium. > > > > > 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. > > > > So a cyrus backup needs to contain: > > > > /var/spool/imap > > /var/lib/imap/mailboxes.db > > > > to be useful as a backup, right? With these to things I can recover... > > I'm making sure I understand this completely. > > I am not sure what your directory structure looks like, but you need to > make sure to backup sieve and quota directories. > > Your procedure may require hand recovery after restore before the mail > store is usable. I recommend using filesystem snapshot (i assume you do > not stop the mail server during backup) before performing backup. This > will make your backup 'sane.' > > > How do you dump mailboxes to/from text? > > What is the restore process?
Good point. So the latest process would be: So a cyrus backup needs to contain: su cyrus -c "ctl_mboxlist -d" > mailboxes-<date>.txt /var/spool/imap /var/lib/imap/quota /var/lib/imap/user /var/lib/imap/sieve Not sure how the filesystem snapshot works? No I do not want to stop the server.