Filesystem level backups?

[Ivan Warren]

Le 4/9/2018 à 2:34 PM, Marc Stürmer a écrit :
> Am 2018-04-09 00:55, schrieb Steve Atkins:
>
>> Will a simple backup of all the files of an multi-dbox give me a
>> consistent state when I recover, or do I need to do something (e.g.
>> lock writes to the mailbox) while I run a backup?
>
> If you are doing this backup with a fully operational mail storage: 
> no, it won't. The reason is quite simple: mdbox saves the data of an 
> email in several files, so there's a good chance that those files 
> might slightly change during backup, while with Maildir all necessary 
> data for the restore is stored in the file names.
>
> If you want to do a consistent backup, you do need file system 
> snapshots and should make sure that this snapshot is consistent or to 
> turn off the mail store during backup completely.
>
> But just doing rsync on the fly as with Maildir is just begging on 
> your side to run into problems sooner or later...
>
Personally, I always do a doveadm backup -u <users> to a different 
location (in mdbox format).

Then do a git -A, git commit, git repack *THEN* rsync the resulting .git 
directories to an off-site location (thus only sending the difference 
between one bakup and the next - in packed format).

The advantage is I can retrieve the status of any mailbox at any point 
in time (right now I have a year long of hour per hour backup of my 
servers mailboxes with a volume that is less than twice the size of the 
entire mailbox sizes).

Granted, it's a low volume, low trafic server, but it works !

--Ivan

(PS : Sorry Mark for the duplicate as I answered to you directly instead 
of the list)
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