On Thu, 9 Jun 2011, Diego Ventrice wrote:
> I'm planning a backup strategy for a new server that will handle
> Hundreds of mailboxes. Largest server for me to admin so far
>
> Would you share your experiences backing up cyrus mailboxes ?
> What tool/s do you use ? how many backups a day do you run ?
Enabling delayed delete and delayed expunge will help a lot:
delete_mode: delayed
expunge_mode: delayed
You'll also want to modify your expire line in cyrus.conf to something
like this:
delprune cmd="/usr/local/cyrus/bin/cyr_expire -E 1 -X 7 -D 7" at=0100
-D and -X control how long deleted and expunged items remain on-disk:
-D delete-days
Remove previously deleted mailboxes older than delete-days (when
using the "delayed" delete mode).
-X expunge-days
Expunge previously deleted messages older than expunge-days
(when using the "delayed" expunge mode).
In the example above, messages and mailboxes are deleted from disk after 7
days. This gives you a 7 day window to very easily restore deleted
mailboxes and messages. At our site, I hardly ever have to restore email
from backups.
We use EMC Networker for backups here. Some folks have systems setup to
do snapshots of the filesystem before a backup, but we just backup the
files like any other filesystem. However, the mailboxes database is very
important. We dump it to a flat file every hour, like so:
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M`
# Make a plaintext dump of the Cyrus mailboxes database
/usr/local/cyrus/bin/ctl_mboxlist -d > \
/var/spool/cyrus/config/db-dumps/mailboxes.db.dump.${DATE}
# Keep 2 days of dumps
find /var/spool/cyrus/config/db-dumps/ -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Andy
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