On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Dan Barowy wrote:
> Jacob Yocom-Piatt wrote:
> >
> > daniel,
> >
> > i have learned the hard way that you should be making incremental backups of
> > all of your machines every night. a decent backup solution should take care
> > of this.
> >
> > my advice is "try it!" testing is simple enough: scp /var/db/spamdb to
> > another machine, run spamdb and see if your IPs are preserved.
> >
> Hi Jake,
>
> The only thing about just copying the file-- I don't want to catch the
> database in some intermediate state. I understand that spamd uses Berkeley
> DB, and I'm guessing that it is able to recover from errors, but I honestly
> don't know since I've never used Berkeley DB for anything myself. For now,
> I'll take your advice and just scp the file to another machine.
>
> I do incremental backups for the machines that count. For me, a firewall is
> not one of them, since with the exception of the spamdb file, there is no
> important information stored on it. I keep system configuration files for
> these kinds of machines elsewhere so that we can quickly put together
> replacements if they fail. That's good enough for me, and less work than
> making sure that a couple dozen incremental backups are actually running
> correctly every night.
A simple and stupid method would be to use spamdb(8) to dump the DB.
It does proper locking. Drawback is that some script massage would be
needed to restore the db.
Also, be aware that the db format is not arch-independent. So e.g.
transferring a db between a i386 and sparc64 would not work.
-Otto
