[Dovecot] Dovecot Backup

[Noel Butler]

On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 14:02 +0200, spamvoll at googlemail.com wrote:

> Hi..
> 
> are there any proofen Methods to backup all mail ?
> 
> shutting down dovecot and tar the hole dir?
> using rsnapshot?
> 
> any hints / thoughts
> 
> im running dovecot2 on freebsd
> 


I assume it's only a single stand alone server, with system passwd
a/c's?  It also depends on the type of use.

Generally tar or rsync would be fine for that.  
A word of advice if using tar, do not use tar cvf"z"  ...  do cvf first,
then use gzip in a second process pass, it is easier to recover from a
corrupted file this way.

But as your setup and/or requirements expand, so does your options. Even
if you use a dedicated backend, like NetApp, dont rely solely on
snapshots, use backup features as well.

Depending on how important the mail is, doing a rolling 7 day rsync or
tar might be required as well more than once a week.
Do not rely on a single nightly rsync, if someone deletes that important
message on Friday, and comes crying to you on Monday, it's tuff luck, in
a corporate world that's unacceptable, in some countries it even
contravenes commercial law acts.

Often over looked is the god file.. you know, the one that decides who
gets mail, be it passwd file or database.
If your userbase is pretty much static, back it up daily, again on a
rolling 7 days. 
if userbase changes often (eg: hosting), back it up hourly, and do a
rolling backup every hour over 7 days, that's what we do, we also once a
week back up those files by tar, they are kept indefinitely (read as:
until my once a year clean out), but we do not do that for mail for
privacy reasons, only 7 days then its gone for good.

Best to have too many backup files, than not have a good one at all.

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