[Dovecot] dsync redesign

[Micah Anderson]

Charles Marcus <CMarcus at Media-Brokers.com> writes:

> On 2012-03-27 11:47 AM, Micah Anderson <micah at riseup.net> wrote:
>> One would be the ability to perform *intelligent* incremental /
>> rotated backups. I can do this now by running a dsync backup
>> operation and then doing manual hardlinking or moving of the backup
>> directories (daily.1, daily.2, weekly.1, monthly.1, etc.), but it
>> would be more intelligent if this were baked into the backup process.
>
> There are already numerous tools that do this flawlessly - I've been using
> rsnapshot (which uses rsync) for this for years.

Are you snapshotting your filesystem (using LVM, or SAN, or similar)
before doing rsnapshot? Because if you aren't then rsync will not
assuredly get everything in a consistent state.

> I don't know if Timo should be spending his time reinventing the wheel.

dsync backup is already here, and it is quite useful.

> I'm much more interested in dsync working flawlessly to keep one or more
> secondary servers in sync, and leave backups to backup software.

I'm not against that idea, I just have not yet found a good way to use
any backup software in such a way to handle large numbers of user's
mail.

> Although, one interesting piece that I am hopeful I'll be able to implement soon
> (with Timo's professional help) is the ability to easily and automatically map
> my rsnapshot snapshots directory to a read-only 'Backups' namespace that
> automatically shows the snapshots by date and time as they are produced. This
> way users could 'go back in time' anytime they wanted without having to call
> me... :)

Interesting idea, would be a great one to share with the community if
you decide to do so.

micah