cyrus partitioning

[Andrew Morgan]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, John McMonagle wrote:

> Again I'm new to cyrus....
>
> In case it is relevant this is what I have to far.
> Running debian sarge.
> Running lvm on software raid1.
> Have about 10gb mail.
> It's not on line yet.
> Thinking of each night doing:
> stop cyrus
> making snapshot of the cyrus partition
> start cyrus
> do backups of snapshot
> blow away snapshot.
>
> Was originally thinking of  putting cyrus on it's own partition but see the 
> cyrus data is scattered around /var.
> Could make a cyrus partition and link into it as needed.
> Now I'm thinking it would be a lot easier to have one big /var partition.
> Also there is the matter of file system.
> Looks like there are fans of ext3, reiserfs and xfs for cyrus.
> Was thinking of reiserfs.
> Probably thinking about it too much ;-)
> Any opinions?

On my system, I just symlink /var/spool/cyrus/ to the big data partition. 
You could, of course, just change the directory paths in your imapd.conf 
file too.

I'm just using ext3 with the dir_index option.  I think you'll find lots 
of opinions about which filesystem is best (check the list archives).  I 
went with ext3 several years ago because it was stable and familiar to me. 
You'll want to tweak the mkfs options so that you have lots of inodes 
available (1 file per message adds up fast).

We don't do anything special for backups here.  Very rarely do files 
change from underneath the backup, and it's not terribly important to have 
a consistent snapshot of the entire mail spool.  You'll probably want to 
make a dump of the mailboxes.db before you make a backup as well, for 
recovery purposes.  In our case, even if we were using lvm, we still can't 
take the system offline even briefly every night for backups.

 	Andy