very large mailboxes backup, long retention period deleted also

[Eric Luyten]

On Sun, March 17, 2013 8:49 pm, Andre Felipe Machado wrote:
> Hello,
> Are there new suggestions of backup strategies for many very large mailboxes
> (many GB and growing), with up to decades long retention period for deleted
> messages also?
>
> I searched the list archives and found the 2009 and 2010 threads interesting,
>  but then proposed solutions may not scale to today and future needs.
>
> Guess that some form of tape archiving may be needed for such long periods.
>
>
> Our initial idea was to use some form of tiered storage, and decades of
> expunge delay. But messages flagged as deleted could sum up to millions on
> each of such large mailboxes years ahead, maybe causing dificulties with large
> directories (stat from tape backup sw, squatter).
> Will hashing mailboxes directories option help?
> Is there a clean way to move messages marked as deleted to another partition?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System
>
>
>
> Maybe, if cyrus becomes compatible with NFS, then HSM solutions like
> http://www.openarchive.net could help.


Andre,

While, in general, participants in this forum still are pretty reluctant
putting their Cyrus mailstores on NFS storage, there has been at least
one architect/administrator of a very large Cyrus configuration pretty
happy using NetApp filers and NFS as their underlying storage structure.
When using intelligent storage (does not have to be NFS, sub-LUN tiering
in block access methods (iSCSI, FC) will also do the job) you will be
pushing the tiering issue down to your storage level, which may be (part
of) a solution to your problem.

Kind regards,
Eric Luyten, Computing Centre VUB/ULB.