John Gonzalez/netMDC admin wrote:
> On Thu, 4 May 2000, Uwe Ohse wrote:
> >don't do it. Nobody likes getting duplicate mail.
>
> Doing backups has absolutely nothing to do with duplicate emails? I fail
> to see your point here?
>
> >> I am pondering switching the company mail server over to Maildir.
> >> It's a very large and busy system. We have had situations before where there
> >
> >Use a raid system.
>
> While a RAID system will protect you from certain failures (ie. hard drive
> crash) there are other failures that it cannot protect you against. Human
> error, hacker rm -rf'ing your server, etc, etc) whereas offsite, or off
> machine backups will.
>
> I would feel better knowing that my users precious mail is also backed up
> on RAID as well as on another machine/media. Im sure they would feel the
> same way as well.
the point is that backing-up e-mail doesn't prevent lost messages, and more results
in duplkicate messages if you restore your backup. e-mail usually moves so fast
that many messages come and go from the server between nightly backups, and many of
the messages you may backup (unless the server crashes immediately after the backup
is completed) will be delivered before the server crashes, and many more messages
will get queued in that time as well... to keep a usefull backup of e-mail you'd
need something that stores the messages as their recieved and erases them when
they're sucessfully delivered.. so either use a RAID system, or write a program that
sends them off to a secondary server whenever they come in.. but nightly backups
just don't cut it for e-mail..
-Brian
