Cyrus Backup Strategy

[pnelson]

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.

How do you dump mailboxes to/from text?
What is the restore process?

Thanks