Cyrus Backup Strategy

[Igor Brezac]

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?
>
> Thanks
>
>

-- 
Igor