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
 

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Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC

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