Backup strategy for large mailbox stores

[Andrew Morgan]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, Vincent Fox wrote:

> 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.

Is there really a significant downside to performing backups on a hot 
cyrus mailstore?  Should I care if Suzie's INBOX was backed up at 3am and 
Sally's INBOX was backed up at 4am?

Vincent, on a slightly related note, what is your server and SAN hardware?

Thanks,
 	Andy