Cyrus Backup Strategy

[pnelson]

On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 12:11, Igor Brezac wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, pnelson wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 11:29, John Alton Tamplin wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Yes dumping to removable medium.
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> 
> I am not sure what your directory structure looks like, but you need to
> make sure to backup sieve and quota directories.
> 
> Your procedure may require hand recovery after restore before the mail
> store is usable.  I recommend using filesystem snapshot (i assume you do
> not stop the mail server during backup) before performing backup.  This
> will make your backup 'sane.'
> 
> > How do you dump mailboxes to/from text?
> > What is the restore process?

Good point.  So the latest process would be:

So a cyrus backup needs to contain:

 su cyrus -c "ctl_mboxlist -d" > mailboxes-<date>.txt

 /var/spool/imap
 /var/lib/imap/quota
 /var/lib/imap/user
 /var/lib/imap/sieve

Not sure how the filesystem snapshot works?  
No I do not want to stop the server.