[Dovecot] Backing Up

Scott Silva ssilva at sgvwater.com
Thu Oct 30 00:14:53 EET 2008


on 10-29-2008 2:46 PM Neil spake the following:
> On 29 Oct 2008, at 16:02, Scott Silva wrote:
>> on 10-29-2008 12:47 PM Dave McGuire spake the following:
>>> On Oct 29, 2008, at 3:42 PM, Scott Silva wrote:
>>>>> What is the best way to do a (server-side) backup of all mail in a
>>>>> user's mail?
>>>>>
>>>> I usually just rsync the /home directories to another server. The
>>>> inital sync
>>>> can take a while, but it gets faster after there is a base to work
>>>> from.
>>>
>>>  ...and it's much less painful if you're using maildir instead of mbox!
>>>
>>>           -Dave
>>>
>> Mbox syncs fairly quickly also. Rsync is very good at working with
>> large text
>> files like mbox, even if users purge stuff from the middle.
>>
>> But since he did show Maildir was in use, I left out also backing up
>> /var/spool/mail/* for the inboxes on a default mbox installation.
> 
> Yeah, the maildir line was mostly why I put the dovecot -n there.
> 
> Do you think rsync will be easier on my servers than tarball/bzip2/scp ?
> 
> Thanks for the help,
> -Neil.
> 
Rsync will use more memory on large filesystems, but it is usually lighter in
CPU, network, and IO time. But tar gives you multiple backups. To achieve that
with rsync you need the rbackup script or rsnapshot.

-- 
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!

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