<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On May 10, 2006, at 6:29 PM, Shayne Hardesty wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV> We switched our mail server over from mbox to maildir a few months ago and couldn't be happier - the performance under normal load is incredible. However we now have a problem with backup.. Typically we would run tar on the mail server, sending its output to another server via ssh.. Like this: tar cfp - /home | gzip | ssh other.server (cd /backups && tar xfp -).. I have tried gzipping the stream on the source side, gzipping on the destination, and running without gzip, all three take an amazingly long time to complete (> 14 hours). Ours is a modest server with about 1300 users, about 300GB of mail total. The whole thing sits on hardware RAID-10, so I'm primarily guarding against a MAJOR hardware failure, a config blunder, or a hacker wiping out files. How do you guys back up your maildir? I've considered exporing the maildir with NFS and backing it up from another server.. Any opinions on that?<BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>I am on FreeBSD with ufs2. Don't know what you Penguin folks have that would do similar. ufs2 supports "snapshots" and I just do a dump/restore with the -L option on dump, which triggers a snapshot. I dump to a file on another disk and gzip it (in a pipe). 19Gb takes less than an hour and the snapshot ensures consistency.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I like the ZFS idea and am planning on implementing that when our backend switches (if it does -- in planning stages now) to Solaris 10... Similar things are available with ZFS.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Chad</DIV><DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Thanks,</DIV> <DIV>Shayne</DIV> <DIV> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica">---</P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica">Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC</P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica">Your Web App and Email hosting provider</P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><A href="mailto:chad@shire.net"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; ">chad at shire.net</SPAN></A></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></P><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>