[Dovecot] Semi-OT: Backing up maildir

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On May 10, 2006, at 6:29 PM, 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?

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.

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.

Chad

>
> Thanks,
> Shayne
>

---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad at shire.net



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