[Dovecot] backup strategie - any ideas and tips

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 05:28, Charles Marcus wrote:
> >> forgive my nievness, and also for top posting - as Ive lost the OP - seeing as 
> >> someones raised the issue of backup ideas and tips - is there anything 
> >> fundamentally wrong with rsync to another (either local or remote location)?
> 
> > Well, there might be one issue, IMHO - what happens if you're backing up
> > a huge mailbox (say over 1GB) and a message from the beginning gets
> > deleted)?
> 
> This is why I love LVM - snapshots...

Snapshots don't solve the problem of inconsistent files, they
just shrink the timing window when the copy appears - and
if you are using LVM2 , snapshots only recently started
working.  Then you have the problem of restoring an old
message without clobbering current ones if they are all
in the same file.   Maildir format makes most of these
issues go away and you can use something simple like
backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) to manage
online rsync-based backups.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com