On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 10:04, Ken Long wrote:
> We recently set up backuppc to handle our backups.
>
> Today, I was upgrading imap on my mail server and for whatever reason,
> it decided to obliterate my inbox from /var/spool/mail. I'm a bad boy
> and keep a lot of mail in my inbox, so it's was a fairly hefty file with
> a few thousand e-mails in it.
>
> I went to BackupPc to restore the file to where it was last night and
> the file that it has in there only had one message in it!!! (now, note
> that I had already been ON e-mail this morning prior to this upgrade and
> know that I still had all my old e-mail at that time, so the e-mails
> were there when the backup ran last night). Going back to the previous
> night, that was a very tiny file too. As it turns out, I had to go back
> about 3 nights before I finally hit a full size file.
> I checked to see if, possibly, the small files just contained the
> difference in the files, but that was not the case either. Also, all of
> the backups in question were incrementals, including the one that had
> the good file in it.
>
> Both the backup server and the mail server are running Linux (Debian
> Sarge) and I am using rsync to do the backup.
>
> Has anyone got any ideas on this?
>
> At this point, I'm extremely disturbed by this and finding myself
> wondering if I am getting good backups or not. Any input would be
> greatly appreciated.
If you use standard unix mbox format, your email is stored in one
big file. Delivery happens by appending to the existing file but
any other operation like deletion by a local mail reader or an
imap server happens by copying the whole mbox to a tmp file and
back with the changes. My guess is that you had a reader or imap
client active during the backup and caught a new delivery in the
inbox while the old contents were being manipulated in a tmp file.
If that's a common problem, you might want to change your mailbox
format to maildir (non-trivial but probably worth it). That will
also make backuppc more efficient since the unchanged files will
all become links in the pool.
--
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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