backup without stopping the imap server?

[Andrew Morgan]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, John Madden wrote:

>>  From what I recall (which might be fuzzy - someone please correct me if any of
>> this is wrong!) there is no way to do this properly. There's some stuff about
>> it on the wiki isn't there? Think I remember seeing something about using LVM
>> mirrors to do it best.
>
> There's just got to be a better way.  What's the risk of backing up the
> "inconsistent" databases?  Can't they just be recovered after performing the
> restore?  And what happens if you just need to restore a single mailbox?  The
> berkeley db's can be backed up with the usual bdb methods, so what about the
> skiplist db's?  Isn't everything else just text files and the per-mailbox
> cache/etc db's that are rebuilt all the time anyway?

We do this all the time.  I don't bother trying to make a point in time 
backup.  In the event of a disaster recovery, I plan to restore the 
databases from the dumps which occur every 30 mins on my machine.

Individual mailbox restores work fine since you don't need to restore the 
databases in that case.  We just restore the mailbox (creating it if 
necessary using cyradm) and run reconstruct afterwards to pick up the 
changes.

 	Andy
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