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