Cyrus Backup Strategy

[John Alton Tamplin]

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.

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