Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?

[Gerhard Wiesinger]

On 01.07.2014 00:28, deoren wrote:
> I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come 
> to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have 
> always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't 
> have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually 
> just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a 
> regular basis.
>
> Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but 
> I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur 
> throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) 
> changes are frequent.
>
> I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred 
> to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails 
> are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a 
> version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time 
> restores.
>
> I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for 
> incremental archives as that sounds promising.

Hello Deoren,

I can recommend dirvish (http://www.dirvish.org/).

Supports incremental backups with aging strategy and hardlinks and very 
efficient storage. Works for years for me. In the background rsync is 
used for syncing the backups but with a high level interface.

Ciao,
Gerhard