On May 10, 2006, at 6:29 PM, 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 am on FreeBSD with ufs2. Don't know what you Penguin folks have
that would do similar. ufs2 supports "snapshots" and I just do a
dump/restore with the -L option on dump, which triggers a snapshot.
I dump to a file on another disk and gzip it (in a pipe). 19Gb takes
less than an hour and the snapshot ensures consistency.
I like the ZFS idea and am planning on implementing that when our
backend switches (if it does -- in planning stages now) to Solaris
10... Similar things are available with ZFS.
Chad
Thanks, Shayne
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider chad at shire.net