On Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:52:56 +0200 Jiri Bourek bourek@thinline.cz wrote:
On 1.7.2014 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.
Suggestions and warnings are most welcome.
Thanks!
Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup machine like this:
rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir
This compares current files with their copies in previous backup. All files which didn't change are hardlinked, saving storage space.
This is pretty much what I do. I have a backup server that rsync pulls off the Dovecot Maildir on my desktop. With a backup server, most of the processing is done on the backup server: the box with the Maildir is only being read. For reasons I've long since forgotten, in order to keep hardlink increments to old backups, I use a separate cp -al on the backup server instead of doing --link-dest=previous-backup-dir.
Theoretically, I should shut off the fetchmail that feeds my Maildir before doing such a backup (and probably shut down Dovecot too). But I'm the only user, so...
A few days ago I deleted my whole INBOX and rsync'ed it back in a matter of minutes.
Here's some info on my backup system: http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/200609/200609.htm
If anyone's interested in backing up to Blu-Ray, here's some info I wrote:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/blu-ray-backup.htm
SteveT
Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance