How to backup cyrus-imapd without stopping service

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Saturday 24 June 2006 00:01, Wesley Craig wrote:
> If you're concerned that the databases files be consistent, then the
> only way is to cleanly shutdown the processes that have the databases
> open.  Snapshots will definitely NOT guarantee consistency of the
> databases, since consistent database updates can take multiple
> writes.  Take for example the recent discussion of database
> corruption during sudden power lose.  Snapshots stop user process
> file access very suddenly, not cleanly.  Problems created by
> snapshots can usually be corrected with reconstruct.

Hmm what a pain.
I would have thought that the on disk format would be self consistent :(

> The real question is, what are your backups for?  If you're concerned
> about recovering mail that the user has deleted, then rsync-ing the
> live system is fine.  If you want a consistent copy that you could
> switch to in the event of a large-scale disaster, then you probably
> want to explore application-level replication.

If the database is not consistent then the seen flags will be broken.. This 
was the primary complaint of my users last time I had to do a large scale 
restoration (after disk failure).

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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