Jon LaBadie wrote at 09:43 -0400 on Jul 1, 2014: > On Tue, Jul 01, 2014 at 09:19:19AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > > Greetings all; > > > > Pursuant to a conversation on the dovecot list about the relatively long > > times involved in rebuilding the dovecot.index file when it gets out of > > sync. > > > > It strikes me that if the backup program could be co-erced into sending a > > signal when it starts to backup a named directory, a signal that holds it > > until the processing of incoming mail has been stopped and the ack signal > > that it has been stopped sent back to amanda, effectively freezing the > > contents of what would normally be an active directory, so that the email > > corpus AND all its indexes would then be in sync when the backup is done. > > > > This would make any recovery efforts later into a considerable smoother > > action. > > > > I can see where such a feature could also be useful for a database of most > > any sort, mail being only an example. > > > > How feasible would it be to add this capability to amanda? > > > I suspect a difficult problem would be how to get the multiple programs > that modify the named directory to honor flag.
There already is support for performing operations before and after the dump (among other things): http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Script_API For older amanda versions that don't have the script API, the classic method (which you can still use with newer amanda) is to configure your amanda client to use a wrapper script instead of gtar or dump. Then your wrapper script can determine if the DLE is one for which you want to run some command to suspend normal operations (e.g., quiesce a database or mail server) during the backup.
