Backup strategy for large mailbox stores

[Vincent Fox]

John Madden wrote:
> That still leaves full backups as a big issue (they take days to run) 
> and NetBackup has a solution for that: You run one full backup and store 
> it on disk somewhere and from then on, fulls are called "synthetic 
> fulls," where the incrementals are applied periodically in snapshot 
> fashion and "voila, you have a full backup."  After that one full 
> backup, the only thing you ever run is incremental.  This takes 2x your 
> disk, but it's manageable.
>
>  <cid:part1.04020608.04080904 at ucdavis.edu>


Our NBU admin runs multiple streams by the way which helped a lot.
So the various "letters" of the cyrus hashing are each broken out into
their own full backup.   Example out of /var/cyrus/mail/ the subdir
A-K are in one stream, L-Q in another, etc.   I'm not an NBU admin
so I dunno why this is more efficient but it worked great.