Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 6/30/2014 5:28 PM, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores. I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental archives as that sounds promising. Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks! Sorry for the late reply, and thanks to everyone who replied with suggestions. I appreciate you taking the time to do that and you've given me a lot of good ideas to look over. Options are good!
Aw: Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Second that. It's great tool that keeps an actual sync (rsync-based) of the data-directory and the metadata (delta) in a seperate directory to restore data from any date. Alternatively, you might want to take a look at bacula, which was faster in most cases (development seems to have stalled, but there is a fork I have not had time to take a look at: bareos). However, I liked the rdiff-backup way because I can restore files via scp or rsync (most of my requests were like please restore from yesterday) or if I want to restore data from a certain date I can use rdiff-backup from command line (bacula is much more complex, and you need the admin tool to restore files - rdiff-backup works from command line locally or via ssh/keyauth) hth, Robert
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
Em 01/07/14 00:16, Charles Cazabon escreveu: deoren dovecot-mailing-l...@whyaskwhy.org wrote: Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Some may agree with me, some may disagree. But for my Maildir backups, i usually exclude the files dovecot.index*. On the most common situations, you'll need to restore just one or other mailbox, so rebuilding those indexes wont kill the server. And by excluding these, i could save 10-15% of backup space on some cases with virtually no disadvantage. And on a worst case scenario, where i would need to restore the whole server and mailboxes, things will already be screwed, so knowing that dovecot would be harder on I/O for rebuilding the indexes will be just another problem :) -- Atenciosamente / Sincerily, Leonardo Rodrigues Solutti Tecnologia http://www.solutti.com.br Minha armadilha de SPAM, NÃO mandem email gertru...@solutti.com.br My SPAMTRAP, do not email it
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 1.7.2014 13:45, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote: Em 01/07/14 00:16, Charles Cazabon escreveu: deoren dovecot-mailing-l...@whyaskwhy.org wrote: Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Some may agree with me, some may disagree. But for my Maildir backups, i usually exclude the files dovecot.index*. On the most common situations, you'll need to restore just one or other mailbox, so rebuilding those indexes wont kill the server. And by excluding these, i could save 10-15% of backup space on some cases with virtually no disadvantage. And on a worst case scenario, where i would need to restore the whole server and mailboxes, things will already be screwed, so knowing that dovecot would be harder on I/O for rebuilding the indexes will be just another problem :) That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers.
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
Em 01/07/14 09:06, Jiri Bourek escreveu: And on a worst case scenario, where i would need to restore the whole server and mailboxes, things will already be screwed, so knowing that dovecot would be harder on I/O for rebuilding the indexes will be just another problem :) That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Anyway, for those not running a that critical system and can afford for an extra half hour of slowness, i really think the tip worths. And for those who, by any reason, cannot afford that extra storage space as well. But you're right, it's all a matter of calculating how critical your mission is and take the correct decisions for it. -- Atenciosamente / Sincerily, Leonardo Rodrigues Solutti Tecnologia http://www.solutti.com.br Minha armadilha de SPAM, NÃO mandem email gertru...@solutti.com.br My SPAMTRAP, do not email it
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 07/01/2014 03:06 PM, Jiri Bourek wrote: That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Building the index as far as I remember doesn't cost in downtime but in higher I/O usage which slows down the server. Eliezer
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tuesday 01 July 2014 08:06:06 Jiri Bourek did opine And Gene did reply: On 1.7.2014 13:45, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote: Em 01/07/14 00:16, Charles Cazabon escreveu: deoren dovecot-mailing-l...@whyaskwhy.org wrote: Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Some may agree with me, some may disagree. But for my Maildir backups, i usually exclude the files dovecot.index*. On the most common situations, you'll need to restore just one or other mailbox, so rebuilding those indexes wont kill the server. And by excluding these, i could save 10-15% of backup space on some cases with virtually no disadvantage. And on a worst case scenario, where i would need to restore the whole server and mailboxes, things will already be screwed, so knowing that dovecot would be harder on I/O for rebuilding the indexes will be just another problem :) That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. I would like to point out that in almost any situation referred to as backing up, if the system is active and processing mail flow during the backup (by any normal backup software), the database(the mail IOW) and the index, will be read and appended to the backup at separate times. Avoiding a duff index that requires a rebuild, is only going to be achieved if the mail system is disabled for the duration of the backup. That leads to the question of how, even if you have 2 systems so that incoming mail can still be handled, how do you go about putting the two back into sync before switching back to the primary server after the backup has been done. This seems to be a problem that has not been well addressed in any mail service scheme I am aware of. Here for instance, I could kill kmail's local fetching for the duration, which allows the fetchmail/procmail/sa/clam chain to continue to collect mail in /var/spool/mail, while the kmail corpus is being archived, and once that has been done, re-enable kmail's local pulling, that, if properly timed in the backup schedual would likely be at most 10 minutes of downtime for incoming (the corpus is around 20G's), because once thats been done, whatever is in /var/spool/mail can be pulled, sorted, and made available to the user in just a couple minutes. That could be accomplished by disabling the script driving inotifywait, but I don't have a clue how to incorporate that function into amanda, which I use here. Any such scheme is also likely to be highly personalized because of the surplus of ways to skin this cat called backing up. But I feel it is something that needs to be addressed, if only to prevent the lengthy delays when rebuilding the index. In kmails case, it doesn't take too long on a per folder basis, seems to be done as a background process the user is just barely aware of via keyboard response times. In fact, since I am on the amanda list too, I intend to ask if such a feature like establishing a handshake signal to achieve this could be obtained from amanda. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
Em 01/07/14 10:06, Eliezer Croitoru escreveu: On 07/01/2014 03:06 PM, Jiri Bourek wrote: That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Building the index as far as I remember doesn't cost in downtime but in higher I/O usage which slows down the server. That's my knowledge as well. Rebuilt of indexes are done on-the-fly when the account is accessed and, thus, there's no downtime involved on that. Of course, with lots of big accounts and lots of initial accesses on the scenario where ALL accounts were restored without indexes, the I/O increase can be so high that the server will be basically unresponsive. That can happen for sure. But on the more common case, which will be restoring just a few accounts, that I/O increase will probably be unnoticable. -- Atenciosamente / Sincerily, Leonardo Rodrigues Solutti Tecnologia http://www.solutti.com.br Minha armadilha de SPAM, NÃO mandem email gertru...@solutti.com.br My SPAMTRAP, do not email it
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 1.7.2014 15:55, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote: Em 01/07/14 10:06, Eliezer Croitoru escreveu: On 07/01/2014 03:06 PM, Jiri Bourek wrote: That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Building the index as far as I remember doesn't cost in downtime but in higher I/O usage which slows down the server. That's my knowledge as well. Rebuilt of indexes are done on-the-fly when the account is accessed and, thus, there's no downtime involved on that. Of course, with lots of big accounts and lots of initial accesses on the scenario where ALL accounts were restored without indexes, the I/O increase can be so high that the server will be basically unresponsive. That can happen for sure. Exactly my point. I saw that happen once and the slowdown effectively became a downtime. But on the more common case, which will be restoring just a few accounts, that I/O increase will probably be unnoticable.
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tuesday 01 July 2014 09:55:37 Leonardo Rodrigues did opine And Gene did reply: Em 01/07/14 10:06, Eliezer Croitoru escreveu: On 07/01/2014 03:06 PM, Jiri Bourek wrote: That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Building the index as far as I remember doesn't cost in downtime but in higher I/O usage which slows down the server. That's my knowledge as well. Rebuilt of indexes are done on-the-fly when the account is accessed and, thus, there's no downtime involved on that. Of course, with lots of big accounts and lots of initial accesses on the scenario where ALL accounts were restored without indexes, the I/O increase can be so high that the server will be basically unresponsive. That can happen for sure. But on the more common case, which will be restoring just a few accounts, that I/O increase will probably be unnoticable. And I just got a reply from the amanda list, it IS possible to construct a dumptype to do that via callable scripts, see: http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Script_API No clue if bacula or the others are that well equipt. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 01.07.2014 00:28, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores. I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental archives as that sounds promising. Hello Deoren, I can recommend dirvish (http://www.dirvish.org/). Supports incremental backups with aging strategy and hardlinks and very efficient storage. Works for years for me. In the background rsync is used for syncing the backups but with a high level interface. Ciao, Gerhard
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tue, Jul 01, 2014 at 02:06:06PM +0200, Jiri Bourek wrote: On 1.7.2014 13:45, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote: i usually exclude the files dovecot.index*. [...] On the most common situations, you'll need to restore just one or other mailbox, so rebuilding those indexes wont kill the server. And by excluding these, i could save 10-15% of backup space on some cases with virtually no disadvantage. That really depends, rebuilding indexes can increase your downtime for hours, so it may be better to pay a bit for extra storage space instead of not being paid at all by your customers. Easy to answer that one. You are talking about two different situations, and the solutions are different. The usual situation is one person having lost mail (whether one mail or all his mail), the catastrophe situation is when you as admin lose everything. To cover both cases, keep the mail files for however long you want/need/can, but only keep the most up-to-date instance of the dovecot index files (maybe two if you want to protect against corruption). That should be a lot less than 10%. I see no reason you'd need an index older than the last known valid index even for one client, and if it's just one client, then 1) reconstructing can't be a big problem 2) it's just one client. What I practise and recommend (not only for mail): - for the catastrophe scenario, keep at least a working day of snapshots. Both restore speed and completeness mandate it, and my (maybe expensive) filers (or ZFS servers) can mirror them off-site. Integrate that cost into the disk cost as you certainly do with RAID. (Yes, that's yet another reason you get the Waaah my IT guys tell me that disk space costs $ per TB but I can get a TB USB drive at WhateverMart for 1/xx of that price!!!) - for the individual restores, backup non-trivially-reconstructable files for a longer term to slower/cheaper-per-TB media, eventually compressed, deduplicated, and/or offline. Your cost depends on the data size, your retention, the compression rate, your redundancy and your churn: it's backup. Since you already have snapshots, you can make your backup from your snapshots to preserve consistency (and since you need snapshots for consistency, why not keep a working day or so hanging around, right?). Bonus points for keeping recent backups on faster storage, and staging backups older than a week or so to cheap storage. The only scenario I can see where I would need to very urgently restore any significant percentage of user files to anything but the most recent version would be some kind of not instantly detected corruption or admin error, thus the several snapshots. HTH, HAND
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 6/30/2014 6:28 PM, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. LVM snapshots of the file system combined with rdiff-backup to a second server. The main advantages over tar/rsync: - Deltas instead of entire file. Plus deltas are compressed. - It handles lots and lots of files well. - You can easily age off older deltas. Not hard to keep 26W or 52W of daily or a few-times-per-day backups. - Metadata such as file permissions / owner / group are stored in regular files in the rdiff-backup target directory, so the destination file system where you store the rdiff-backup files does not matter much. - Files are stored along with a SHA1 hash, making it possible to detect bitrot in your backups. Downsides: - Restoring a file more then 10 or 20 deltas old requires a lot of disk activity (putting /tmp on a SSD helps a lot) Suggestions: - Each mailbox folder should be its own rdiff-backup target. That allows you to only backup mailbox folders which have changed in last N hours/days. It also means that if things go pear-shaped with rdiff-backup, only that one backup target is at risk. - Put /tmp on a SSD, especially if you run rdiff-backup verify and validate more then 1-2 revisions into the past. - Once you have your rdiff-backup directories on another server it is trivial to LVM snapshot that and then rsync to either a USB drive or offsite server (or both). The rdiff-backup directory structure is very rsync-friendly. - If you're going to do hourly backups, have (2) rdiff-backup locations. One that deals with the hourly backups and has a short retention cycle of only 3-4 weeks. Another location that deals with daily backups and has a 55W retention cycle. That way you can restore to an hour within the past 3-4 weeks, or any day within the past 55W.
Re: Aw: Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 7/1/2014 4:48 AM, Infoomatic wrote: If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Second that. It's great tool that keeps an actual sync (rsync-based) of the data-directory and the metadata (delta) in a seperate directory to restore data from any date. Alternatively, you might want to take a look at bacula, which was faster in most cases (development seems to have stalled, but there is a fork I have not had time to take a look at: bareos). However, I liked the rdiff-backup way because I can restore files via scp or rsync (most of my requests were like please restore from yesterday) or if I want to restore data from a certain date I can use rdiff-backup from command line (bacula is much more complex, and you need the admin tool to restore files - rdiff-backup works from command line locally or via ssh/keyauth) I looked at Bacula/Amanda - which are great systems if your focus is tape or backup to disk. But neither of them had good support for backup to disk, rsync to offsite. rsnapshot / rdiff-backup are just better at creating backups which are rsync-friendly over the WAN. Which also means you can easily push the backups to USB drives without having to wait hours and hours.
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 2014-07-01 00:28, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. I suggest rdiff-backup: a great tool that keeps an actual sync (rsync-based) of the data-directory and the metadata (delta) in a seperate directory to restore data from any date. Alternatively, you might want to take a look at bacula, which was faster in most cases (development seems to have stalled, but there is a fork I have not had time to take a look at: bareos). However, I liked the rdiff-backup way because I can restore files via scp or rsync (most of my requests were like please restore from yesterday) or if I want to restore data from a certain date I can use rdiff-backup from command line (bacula is much more complex, and you need the admin tool to restore files) hth, Robert
Re: Aw: Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tuesday 01 July 2014 15:59:09 Thomas Harold did opine And Gene did reply: On 7/1/2014 4:48 AM, Infoomatic wrote: If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Second that. It's great tool that keeps an actual sync (rsync-based) of the data-directory and the metadata (delta) in a seperate directory to restore data from any date. Alternatively, you might want to take a look at bacula, which was faster in most cases (development seems to have stalled, but there is a fork I have not had time to take a look at: bareos). However, I liked the rdiff-backup way because I can restore files via scp or rsync (most of my requests were like please restore from yesterday) or if I want to restore data from a certain date I can use rdiff-backup from command line (bacula is much more complex, and you need the admin tool to restore files - rdiff-backup works from command line locally or via ssh/keyauth) I looked at Bacula/Amanda - which are great systems if your focus is tape or backup to disk. But neither of them had good support for backup to disk, rsync to offsite. rsnapshot / rdiff-backup are just better at creating backups which are rsync-friendly over the WAN. Which also means you can easily push the backups to USB drives without having to wait hours and hours. Well, I've been using amanda since 1998, and it was fairly mature then, and its always done what I wanted. I do backup to disk, but if I wanted offsite, then copying its backup and index files to an external drive offers bare metal recovery completely up to the date of the last backup the way I do it. As is, I just use a separate disk from the OS's disk as virtual tape. Works a treat. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:52:56 +0200 Jiri Bourek bou...@thinline.cz wrote: On 1.7.2014 00:28, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores. I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental archives as that sounds promising. Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks! Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup machine like this: rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir This compares current files with their copies in previous backup. All files which didn't change are hardlinked, saving storage space. This is pretty much what I do. I have a backup server that rsync pulls off the Dovecot Maildir on my desktop. With a backup server, most of the processing is done on the backup server: the box with the Maildir is only being read. For reasons I've long since forgotten, in order to keep hardlink increments to old backups, I use a separate cp -al on the backup server instead of doing --link-dest=previous-backup-dir. Theoretically, I should shut off the fetchmail that feeds my Maildir before doing such a backup (and probably shut down Dovecot too). But I'm the only user, so... A few days ago I deleted my whole INBOX and rsync'ed it back in a matter of minutes. Here's some info on my backup system: http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/200609/200609.htm If anyone's interested in backing up to Blu-Ray, here's some info I wrote: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/blu-ray-backup.htm SteveT Steve Litt* http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores. I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental archives as that sounds promising. Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks!
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On 1.7.2014 00:28, deoren wrote: I'm still pretty new to running a mail server, but one thing I've come to appreciate over the years is a good backup strategy. Since I have always run my own servers for practice and for personal use I don't have access to Enterprise backup solutions. Because of that I usually just fall back to scripts and tarballs and offload the content on a regular basis. Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. I went with Maildir format because based on my reading it is referred to as time tested and corruption resistant. Because individual emails are stored as separate files this also leads me to believe that a version control system (Git, SVN) would allow for easy point in time restores. I'm also going to research the GNU tar utility's support for incremental archives as that sounds promising. Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks! Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup machine like this: rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir This compares current files with their copies in previous backup. All files which didn't change are hardlinked, saving storage space.
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
Hi, Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks! Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup machine like this: rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir check out rsnapshot. Tried, tested, and true on my systems for just short of a decade now...
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
Quoting Bob Miller b...@computerisms.ca: Hi, Suggestions and warnings are most welcome. Thanks! Since you're using maildir, you might want to check rsync out as well, especially with --link-dest. In short, you call rsync on your backup machine like this: rsync --link-dest=previous-backup-dir source new-backup-dir check out rsnapshot. Tried, tested, and true on my systems for justshort of a decade now... rsnapshot was great until the filelists got too long for me. Scripted ZFS snapshots B send/receives were my solution. Rick
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
On Tue, 01 Jul 2014 09:41:25 +1000 Bob Millerb...@computerisms.ca wrote check out rsnapshot. Tried, tested, and true on my systems for just short of a decade now... +1 for rsnapshot. With the config file you can determine how many backups for different days that you want to keep. eg from the config file: retain hourly 6 retain daily 7 retain weekly 7 retain monthly 3 Add to the awesome config that it will save you disk space by hardlinking existing copies to previous files that were already backup up, while ensuring that each snapshot folder is easily restored. You will have yourself a perfect backup platform which is deployed in less time then it takes to have a relaxing bath! Also, a version control system is not a backup system. Check out this blog post: http://blog.codekills.net/2009/12/08/using-git-for-backup-is-asking-for-pain/
Re: Mailboxes are in Maildir format. Any good backup tips? Had success with version control?
deoren dovecot-mailing-l...@whyaskwhy.org wrote: Right now I'm using LVM snapshots + tarballs for daily backups, but I'd like to get better coverage for incremental changes that occur throughout the day. The size of existing content is low, but (small) changes are frequent. If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Charles -- --- Charles Cazabon GPL'ed software available at: http://pyropus.ca/software/ ---
