My plan on backup's are taken directly from Paul. I wrote
a PHP application that I can dump a users messages completely
or based on time. The beauty of this idea is if I need to
restore a single user, I don't have to restore the entire
database backup.
So the idea would be, Sunday dump all Email for all users.
Monday dump Su-Mo users mail, Tuesday dump Mo-Tu, etc.
I hope to even keep a few months of all users Email such that
they can recover their own messages without me being involved.
As for the database itself, I use PostgreSQL and will be using
the PITR feature to save the WAL files each day and do a nightly
copy of the DB. This way if the DB tanks at 11:35am, I can
copy the last backup and say, restore up until 11:34am.
The idea is, the DB is only to store the "realtime" data, ie.
I have no desire to keep 3 months of a 25GB database backed up.
I keep the users Email (tightly compressed) on an inexpensive
SATA RAID array.
--
David A. Niblett | email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Administrator | Phone: (352) 334-3400
Gainesville Regional Utilities | Web: http://www.gru.net/
<http://www.gru.net/>
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of zamri
Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 5:19 AM
To: DBMail mailinglist
Subject: Re: [Dbmail] backup strategy
On 7/6/06, Brian Weaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Speaking as someone who just had a server failure and is *still*
trying to recover from it. Backup often and AUTOMATE it, and for
the
love of all that's holy... do a test restore from your backups
on a
semi regular basis!
yes. we should have automated backup. I have a dedicated backup server
for this.
I think I might have been happier if my box had a "catastrophic"
failure, but what happened was more insidious. The memory went
south,
but not so bad that it would crashed the box. It introduced
problems
into my database and potentially into the process of trying to
extract
the data from the box. Since the memory wasn't bad enough to
cause the
box to fail I didn't notice a problem for a while. So every time
I did
something that saved information from main memory back to disk I
was
potentially corrupting my data.
That was serious. I can't imagine if it ever happens to me.
As a result I was wondering what dbmail users think of this
potential
enhancement: Add a column in the database for the physical
message
blocks that is the MD5 or SHA hash of the block at insert. This
could
be used by the dbmail utility to do a data validation and to
catch
problems in the db that might be caused by either memory or disk
errors.
this i believe involve some overhead but I also think it should present
as an option.
