On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 05:44, Karl Latiss wrote:
On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 19:29 -0500, Shayne Hardesty wrote:
We switched our mail server over from mbox to maildir a few months ago and couldn't be happier - the performance under normal load is incredible. However we now have a problem with backup.. Typically we would run tar on the mail server, sending its output to another server via ssh.. Like this: tar cfp - /home | gzip | ssh other.server (cd /backups && tar xfp -).. I have tried gzipping the stream on the source side, gzipping on the destination, and running without gzip, all three take an amazingly long time to complete (> 14 hours). Ours is a modest server with about 1300 users, about 300GB of mail total. The whole thing sits on hardware RAID-10, so I'm primarily guarding against a MAJOR hardware failure, a config blunder, or a hacker wiping out files. How do you guys back up your maildir? I've considered exporing the maildir with NFS and backing it up from another server.. Any opinions on that?
I've had great success with rsync and hard link based backup.
I've customised my own solution based on the scripts found at http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
Backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) does a great job of automating backups to on-line storage and can use rsync as the transport. However, rsync loads the whole target directory in memory at startup so there is a certain per-file overhead. Be sure you have plenty of RAM on both the target and backup server.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com