[Dovecot] Semi-OT: Backing up maildir

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 05:44, Karl Latiss wrote:
> 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/

Backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) does a great
job of automating backups to on-line storage and can use
rsync as the transport.  However, rsync loads the whole
target directory in memory at startup so there is a certain
per-file overhead.  Be sure you have plenty of RAM on both
the target and backup server.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com