[Dovecot] Semi-OT: Backing up maildir

[Shayne Hardesty]

  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?

Thanks,
Shayne
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