On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 01:51:05AM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
I'm mainly wondering if it's common for backup programs to support using a separate program to generate the backups. For example if there was a "dovecot-backup" binary that just dumps all (or new-since-last-backup) of the users' mails into stdout, which the backup program can use. Or perhaps in that case there wouldn't really be much of anything for the backup to do except to write it to tape..
I know at least tivoli storage manager (TSM) should be able to handle such lists. AFAIK this is how GPFS's "mmbackup" utility works. It utilizes a fast inode scan API to find all candidate files, and will be much more efficient than a normal backup client that traverses the whole fs.
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21305169But in addition to new-since-last-backup, we would probably also need a deleted-since-last-backup feature.
-jf