Hot backups

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, James Miller wrote:
> Rob, I'm still abit confused about what's needed to get cyrus (including
> index files) into a consistent state -- ready for a backup/snapshot.. etc.
> etc.

Right now?  Stop it, snapshot the volume, start it again.  It should take a
few seconds, which is an acceptable downtime at, say, 04:00 local time... at
least for most people.

Then you can do whatever you need to the snapshot volume (compress, dump to
tape, whatever), and release the snapshot.

Anything else will not be 100% consistent.  But, if you can live with
seen-state loss and the need to run reconstruct on recovered mailboxes, you
don't really need 100% consistency.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh