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.