[Dovecot] Semi-OT: Backing up maildir

[Bill Boebel]

On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 19:29 -0500, Shayne Hardesty wrote:
>   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?
>

DRBD + heartbeat works great or real-time mirroring of maildirs between
two servers...  http://www.drbd.org  http://www.linux-ha.org/

This will protect you against hardware failures, but since deletes are
mirrored too you will still probably want to also do some sort of snapshot
backups or copying of incoming mail as the others have suggested.

Bill