[Dovecot] Semi-OT: Backing up maildir

[Karl Latiss]

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/

-- 
Karl Latiss <karl.latiss at atvert.com.au>
Atvert Systems