Andrew Morgan wrote: > But then I started thinking about how I was going to backup all this new > data... Our backup administrator isn't too excited about trying to backup > 12TB of email data.
Just a side note: For most backup systems it is not the size which matters much (because only a small portion of data gets changed each day on a typical IMAP storage) it is the *NUMBER* of files, because - for an incremental backup - each file stat data has to be read and compared. With ZFS (gzip compression activated), we get 31 million files in 3-4 hours (example with tivoli storage manager): 01/03/09 23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS BEGIN 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects inspected: 31,305,555 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects backed up: 25,347 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects updated: 0 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects rebound: 0 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects deleted: 0 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects expired: 308,991 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of objects failed: 0 01/03/09 23:38:48 Total number of bytes transferred: 2.56 GB 01/03/09 23:38:48 Data transfer time: 280.87 sec 01/03/09 23:38:48 Network data transfer rate: 9,594.01 KB/sec 01/03/09 23:38:48 Aggregate data transfer rate: 209.05 KB/sec 01/03/09 23:38:48 Objects compressed by: 15% 01/03/09 23:38:48 Elapsed processing time: 03:34:49 01/03/09 23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS END 01/03/09 23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC OBJECT END SA_SO_MAIL 01/03/09 20:00:00 01/03/09 23:38:48 Executing Operating System command or script: /mail/bin/pr_backupsnapshot_off Just to give you a "real life" number... Pascal ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html