Cyrus Backup Strategy

[John Alton Tamplin]

pnelson wrote:

>Yes dumping to removable medium.
>  
>
Why not write directly to tape rather than going through an extra step 
and requiring extra disk space?

>So a cyrus backup needs to contain:
>
>/var/spool/imap 
>/var/lib/imap/mailboxes.db
>
>to be useful as a backup, right?  With these to things I can recover... 
>I'm making sure I understand this completely.
>
You need to backup all of /var/spool/imap and /var/lib/imap.  Some parts 
are less critical, but they are small anyway so you shouldn't try and 
leave out parts of it.

>How do you dump mailboxes to/from text?
>
 From cron as user cyrus, ctl_mboxlist -d >/var/lib/imap/mailboxes.txt

>What is the restore process?
>  
>
That gets a bit more fun.  Our policy is to do restores for users at the 
folder level (assuming a user error restore -- a dead disk restore is 
easy, just restore everything).  We create a RESTORE folder under the 
user's mailbox, set a quota on it, then restore all the message files 
and cyrus.* files from the folder to be recovered into that directory.  
Then run reconstruct on user/joe/RESTORE, and let them do what they want 
with the messages there.  The RESTORE folder is automatically deleted 2 
weeks later.

-- 
John A. Tamplin                               Unix System Administrator
Emory University, School of Public Health     +1 404/727-9931