I've been doing some reading of the list archives, and have learned that my current backup process is not sufficient. I'm hoping to get some feedback on my new proposed process. I only have about 20 users, total mail store is under 300 MB. I can stop the services. I want to be able to recover from total disaster, and from user errors. For now, I will do a full backup nightly
I'm using RH9 and Simon Matter's RPMs. Here are the beginnings of a script that I hope to use:
####################################### postfix stop # Stop MTA etc/rc.d/init.d/cyrus-imapd stop # Stop Cyrus su cyrus -c "ctl_mboxlist -d" > mailboxes-`date '+%m%d%y'` # List mailboxes; #file makes restore easier???
It's not quite as critical as I originally thought (as the ACL information _is_ stored somewhere else as well), but it can make recovery from db corruption easier, and can make restoring to a different machine a _lot_ less fuss. That said, I think Simon Matter's RPM builds take care of making these backups for you anyway. According to a recent post by Simon it makes backups in /var/lib/imap/backups - so verify that they're there and look right, and you should be fine.
>#Backup the following directories (I haven't decided on which tool yet): #/var/spool/imap #/var/lib/imap
etc/rc.d/init.d/cyrus-imapd start # Start Cyrus postfix start #Start MTA ########################################
Will this be sufficient? Thanks,
It's pretty similar to what I do. Though I use snapshots instead of stopping the daemons, I'd /prefer/ to be able to just stop the daemons. Unfortunately, my mail spools are growing - fast - and I have users who keep weird hours (not least myself). At last check the gzipped backup files were 3gb, from mail spools of 4.6GB. This would mean too much downtime if I stopped the daemons, especially since I'm doing network backups to (slow) tape.
IMHO the best way to make sure your backups are OK is to restore them. Preferably to a test machine ;-) - ideally the one you'd be restoring to if there was a hardware failure right now (and maybe another, different, one as well). Alas, you're proabably in a situation like me - "what cold spare?!?" - where this isn't possible. I did my restore testing on a hapless debian 3.0 box - and this is why I'm so paranoid about converting the mailboxes.db . Everything else about the restore went perfectly, but it couldn't use the mailboxes.db because of a different berkley db version. I'm very glad I learned that then, and not after a server failure.
Craig Ringer
