backup without stopping the imap server?

[Jared Watkins]

John Madden wrote:

>>I'm using LVM snapshot on linux box and it work perfectly
>>    
>>
>
>But a filesystem-level snapshot isn't a clear copy of what's uncommitted to the DB's.
>
>I still haven't heard how bad a situation it is if the db's in the 'db' directory
>are corrupted -- what do you do then?
>  
>
AFAIK the only really important data that can't be easily replaced is
the mailbox list database.  So I do regular dumps of that file and keep
the last several on hand in plain text format.  The database indexes in
each user folder can be rebuilt with the reconstruct command if there
are any corruption problems...  Remember.. the per user 'databases' are
not storing the entire message.. only some cached metadata to make
response times better for the client. Also.. there are two automatic
backups of the important stuff from /var/imap if you had to use one of
those.

Jared


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