Best way to backup cyrus system (lots of inodes!)

[Rob Siemborski]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Steve Barber wrote:

> I've seen some interesting comments in this thread so far, but none
> seem to discuss our concerns:  We have a fairly large installation,
> and due to the file-per-message nature this makes for millions of
> small files which can wreak havoc on a backup system.  We're using
> VXFS on Solaris, but are using a homegrown hodgepodge of stuff
> to get reasonable backup performance, and our trust in this solution
> is not terribly high.  I'm curious how others have addressed the
> situation?  We have not even attempted to set TSM or any other
> commercial backup software loose on the mail server yet because of the
> incredible index requirements.

We're using vxfs on solaris, taking a snapshot of the applicable
filesystem, backing up the filesystem, aned then deleting the snapshot.

This leads to perfect consistancy, though it does require the creation of
a snapshot on a live system.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper