Tutorial on how to backup/restore cyrus

[Andrew Morgan]

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, John Madden wrote:

>> I don't completely agree here, there are ways to do snapshots without any
>> downtime for example in a SAN environment or using filesystem or LVM based
>> snapshot methods. However, it does not mean your snapshots are really
>> consistent from the aplications point of view.
>
> And that's the big question: How inconsistent can things be without 
> shutting down cyrus?

How consistent does it need to be?

We dump the mailboxes.db to a flat file at midnight, then start a regular 
filesystem backup of the system.  In the event of a complete system 
failure or disaster recovery, our plan is to restore everything from the 
latest backup then (most likely) rebuild the mailboxes.db from the flat 
file.  Our mail store is on a SAN, so it seems unlikely that we'll ever 
reach this point unless the building falls down.

The more common case is individual mailbox restores.  I do a fair amount 
of mailbox restores at the request of users that have accidently deleted a 
message.  I simply create a new subfolder in the user's INBOX named 
RESTORE and recover all the message files and the cyrus.header file into 
it.  Then I run reconstruct and quota on the mailbox to fix things up. 
This has always worked without fail for me.

 	Andy