Les Mikesell wrote:
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.
I could be wrong but if you are using standard mailbox format it would
usually store in /var/spool/mail/<mailbox> or similar.
If you view that mailbox on the command line using mail, then quit, it
sometimes will write saved messages to a mailbox stored in your home
directory (i.e. /home/users/me/<mailbox>. Then only newer emails
will sit in your mailbox under /var/spool/mail. This may be why you had
data "missing", the backuppc may be only set to grab /var/spool/mail,
not your home dir.
Its best that you convert to maildir format, usually cyrus-imap or
courier-imap are excellent choices.
Regards,
Les
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