Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:52:56 +0200
Jiri Bourek <bourek at thinline.cz> wrote:

> 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.

This is pretty much what I do. I have a backup server that rsync pulls
off the Dovecot Maildir on my desktop. With a backup server, most of
the processing is done on the backup server: the box with the Maildir
is only being read. For reasons I've long since forgotten, in order to
keep hardlink increments to old backups, I use a separate cp -al on the
backup server instead of doing --link-dest=previous-backup-dir. 

Theoretically, I should shut off the fetchmail that feeds my Maildir
before doing such a backup (and probably shut down Dovecot too). But
I'm the only user, so...

A few days ago I deleted my whole INBOX and rsync'ed it back in a
matter of minutes.

Here's some info on my backup system:
http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/200609/200609.htm

If anyone's interested in backing up to Blu-Ray, here's some info I
wrote:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/blu-ray-backup.htm

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance