Backup strategy for large mailbox stores

[Michael Bacon]

--On February 16, 2010 9:35:56 AM -0800 Vincent Fox <vbfox at ucdavis.edu> 
wrote:

> Michael Bacon wrote:
>> For those of you doing ZFS, what do you use to back up the data after a
>> zfs  snapshot?  We're currently on UFS, and would love to go to ZFS, but
>> haven't  figured out how to replace ufsdump in our backup strategy.
>>
> There are other commercial backup solutions however we were
> already a NetBackup shop.  So we simply set our backups to run
> against the mail at yesterday path. A locally-written script managing
> the snapshot process  rolls @yesterday into a date-coded format
> e.g. mail at 20100214 before doing the new @yesterday snapshot.
> It also destroys the 15th snapshot.
>
> The snapshot path is a "real" filesystem that
> is traversible it's just read-only.  So other backup
> solutions like Amanda, star, etc. should work fine.
> I expect everything except ufsdump should work
> fine and really, doing backups on a hot filesystem with
> as much activity as Cyrus seems pretty iffy anyhow.

Yeah, unfortunately our enterprise backup solution is TSM, which is good 
for just about everything but Cyrus.  (It keeps a database with an entry 
for every single file, which with Cyrus's tens of millions of files, really 
doesn't work well.)

We'll probably end up doing something with tar and either TSM or our new 
VTL infrastructure, but I was hoping someone had some prebuilt scripts or 
something cool that would take care of it.