[Dovecot] backing up emails

[Noel Butler]

On Tue, 2010-06-29 at 22:28 +0800, Angelo Chen wrote:

> Hi Noel,
> 
> 
> I use exim4 and it delivers right into ~/.Maildir, so I assume /home contains all the emails, right? why we need to back up /etc   and /var/mail? Thanks,
> 


No real experience with Exim, last time I looked at it was 10 years ago,
but if that's where it stores all received messages, read or new-unread,
then /home it is.

/etc contains most of your system config stuff, always good idea to back
it up, if this is a server it should have no GUI crap installed so it
should be fairly small, and /var/vmail was an example only, just like
i'd say /var/www if this was a web server, or /var/named if DNS server.
/var/mail /var/vmail etc is not applicable to you as you use system and
not virtual users.

Cheers


> > 
> > You're using system accounts so yes, but I'd hope that if server is on
> > any importance you would be doing more than just backing up that.
> > /home /etc /var/mail or where ever your MTA stores its mail before users
> > get it should be backed up daily at a bare minimum.
> > 
> > If this is a server of importance you should be doing nightly tar
> > backups of at least  /etc, once a week a full rsync of the entire box,
> > and a nightly rsync of your mail store, in your case /home and /var/mail
> > (or /var/spool/postfix if you're using that), and use that on a rolling
> > 7 day basis... providing you have the space for it on your backup
> > server.
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
>