[Dovecot] backup mdbox best strategy

[Nick Edwards]

Claus,
Robert's suggestion is good, we backup maildir, with 5.9TB in 2 hours
to SATA , we also run a backup of that backup, so we have two extra
copies (this is on top of NAS snapshots)
tape is just too slow for anything serious these days.

N ik


On 12/5/13, Claus <claus.r at bayern-mail.de> wrote:
> 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
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