[Dovecot] backup mdbox best strategy

[Claus]

Am 02.12.2013 20:37, schrieb Robert Schetterer:
> Am 02.12.2013 18:47, schrieb Claus:
>> Hello,
>>
>> i have to backup (tape library) a mailsystem with about 300.000
>> Mailboxes on 2 backends. Summary of all mailboxes are 2 TByte.
>> The mailstore is mdbox.
>> Is it save to do a simple filesystem backup (full and incremental) with
>> backupsoftware?
> hm i wouldnt do that with mdbox, cause it does strongly depends to
> index, but if you use dsync you could convert to maildir at backup,
> maildir should be fine to store on tape, but with 2 TB this is only good
> for total desaster archive, i guess it would take long time to restore
> specially single mailboxes in acceptable time, from tape
> Better use cheap sata storage raids for frequent backups, and do tape
> snapshots sometimes.
>
>> What is the prefered strategy to do a backup for desaster recovery
>> (mailsystem crash) and restoring single usermailboxes?
> dsync should do fine
>
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Dsync
>
> but there is no universal answer to this, perhaps filesystem snapshots
> strategy might better, it depened on your general setup , filesystems ,
> mailstore etc.
>
> wait for others report their solutions, and find the one fits best at
> your place
>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Claus
>
>
> Best Regards
> MfG Robert Schetterer
>
thanks for your answer,
the main reason we plan to use mdbox is to reduce backuptime.
Now we are using Maildir on cyrus and the (full)-backup takes about 20 
hours on one backend storing 150 GB of Mails in about 3 million files.
Because of that we have many backends, so we can parallelize the backup 
prozess.

greets, Claus