Tutorial on how to backup/restore cyrus

[lkolchin at univ.haifa.ac.il]

Hello All,
Thanks for all responses.

After reading your posts on the issue and reading some more stuff, I'll make a summary below:

1) I'll make a dump of all mailboxes to the text file:

su - cyrus -c "ctl_mboxlist -d" > /var/lib/imap/mailboxlist.txt

And I can restore it with:

su - cyrus -c "ctl_mboxlist -u" < /var/lib/imap/mailboxlist.txt

2) I will make a regular backups (in my case with DSM client) of /var/spool/imap/ and /var/lib/imap/, without stopping cyrus, in this case I endanger myself in some data inconsistency and maybe some e-mails lost (which were in process while backup was running).
Please correct me on the above if there are some other dangers I'm not aware of???

3) In case of disaster I can just copy mail directly from the backup to the mail store directory (/var/spool/imap/user/%username%), 
And run:
/usr/lib/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -rf user/username


4) All quotas (in /var/lib/imap/quota/%firstletter of username%/)will not be reconstructed, so I'll need to do it manually.

5) All subscription and seen info (in /var/lib/imap/user/%firstletter of username%/) will not be reconstructed, but I could restore it from the regular backup.

Please read my summary and tell me if the things right?
Should I be aware of other things I didn't mentioned here and what scripts to implement for this case?


Best Regards,
Leon Kolchinsky






-----Original Message-----
From: info-cyrus-bounces at lists.andrew.cmu.edu [mailto:info-cyrus-bounces at lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Wil Cooley
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 1:03 AM
To: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: RE: Tutorial on how to backup/restore cyrus

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 17:48 +0300, lkolchin at univ.haifa.ac.il wrote:

> Thank you Vittorio for your script, but you are stopping the cyrus and 
> I think it's very problematic in production environment.

I think the point is that, short of using some of the replication stuff from pre-2.3 in CVS, there's no proper way of doing a hot backup.  All of the snapshotting techniques (whether filesystem snapshots, rsync or
otherwise) require a little bit of downtime to complete, but are employed *specifically* to minimize downtime.

Wil
--
Wil Cooley <wcooley at nakedape.cc>
Naked Ape Consulting, Ltd. <http://nakedape.cc>