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

[DAVID G MCMURTRIE]

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.
>
> Is anyone successfully implementing any sort of incremental backup
> solution in a large production environment?

You might want to look at Veritas NetBackup.  They have a thing called
FlashBackup that does raw device backups but still lets you do per-file
restores.  It's specifically for filesystems with lots of small files.

Thanks,

Dave
--
Dave McMurtrie, Systems Programmer
University of Pittsburgh
Computing Services and Systems Development,
Development Services -- UNIX and VMS Services
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