Hi - I'm grappling with the issue of how to either do backups or take snapshots of a live cyrus system so that all the metadata is properly saved; meaning that the indexes and db files match exactly the messages in ~/cyrus/mail so that the backup or snapshot can be copied to a new system and brought up cleanly when cyrus is started. I recall someone on this list mentioning that they use LVM snapshots for this purpose, but I did a little research on this, and it appears that file system performance degrades dramatically when LVM snapshots are used. What I'm thinking about using instead is replication with DRBD to another server, turning off the replication periodically, making a backup of the replicated filesystem, and then turning replication back on. Even here, though, it seems like it would be possible turn off the replication after a new message has been stored but before either the indexes or the .db files are updated. Is there any way to get around this or has the application been coded to be "transaction safe"? This is one advantage of maildir format: the metadata is just built right into the message filename, so the only thing that can get lost or corrupted is the indexes, which can just be rebuilt. Of course there's a sizable performance penalty that comes with this... ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://www.cyrusimap.org/ List Archives/Info: http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/info-cyrus/
