How to backup cyrus-imapd without stopping service

[Seiichirou Hiraoka]

Hi,

I'm using Cyrus-IMAPD 2.2.10 on two solaris9 hosts
- One is main and another is backup - and using rsync (*1)
to sync two host's /var/imap every day.
Two host mount (share) /var/spool/imap via NFS.

(*1) run as following on backup
       /opt/sfw/bin/rsync -a --delete --rsync-path=/opt/sfw/bin/rsync
         main:/var/imap/ /var/imap/

Usualy, only main host's imapd is running and backup host's
imapd is not running. I run imapd on backup manually in case
I want to use by test.

The composition is following.

         main                             backup
   +-------------+                    +-------------+
   | Local Disk  |                    | Local Disk  |
   |  /var/imap  |                    |  /var/imap  |
   +-------------+                    +-------------+
          | NFS                              | NFS
   +------------------------------------------------+
   |        NFS Server      /var/spool/imap         |
   +------------------------------------------------+

Well, I have a trouble and question.

Yesterday, I want to test on backup so I run imapd.
Then, error message output continues to /var/log/imapd.log
as following.

- Jun 22 22:01:12 solomon2 ctl_cyrusdb[25123]: [ID 854764 local6.error]
    DBERROR: error listing log files: No such file or directory
- Jun 22 22:01:12 solomon2 ctl_cyrusdb[25123]: [ID 686478 local6.error]
    DBERROR: archive /var/imap/db: cyrusdb error

I think the reason, the file in /var/imap/ is broken because of
rsync timing of execution.

So I want to know the better (or recommend) way to backup
Cyrus-IMAPD /var/imap files to other host without stop
service.

Please tell me how to achieve it.

Best regards,

- flathill