how to backup a cyrus server?

[Nik Conwell]

On Dec 4, 2006, at 6:42 PM, Andrew Morgan wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Rafael Mahecha wrote:
>
[...]
>> I used to use tivoli to backup the old server (which was ok since  
>> no data bases were involved)... but since cyrus has databases and  
>> such, I am concern about file-locking and database corruption.
>>
>> What is the best way to back up the server? shutdown cyrus for a  
>> while, then snap shot it, and then back up to tivoli.... or should  
>> I just be able to back up the running server directly to tivoli?
>>
>> what other software can I use to backup?
>
> Check out the Cyrus Wiki page at:
>
>   http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Cyrus/Backup
>
> Most people just make a regular backup of the filesystem using  
> whatever tools they normally use.  The only "trick" is to export  
> your mailboxes.db to a flat text file in order to back it up (which  
> you should be doing periodically anyways).
[...]

We're using TSM for backups.  The Wiki notes using LVM snapshots so  
we ended up doing that.  We have a pre-backup script that does the  
ctl_mboxlist -d for a text mailboxes file, ctl_cyrusdb -c to  
checkpoint, a sync, and then a lvcreate --snapshot --size 10G --name  
lv_cyrus_snapshot /dev/vg_cyrus/lv_cyrus.  We then mount the snapshot  
and back it up normally with TSM.  Haven't had a lot of restore  
experience but testing worked out OK.