Bill Moran wrote:
On Wed, 24 May 2006 14:16:07 -0400
D Canfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I'm just curious how other users are backing up maildirs using bacula. We're using cyrus as our mail server, so we've got about 162GB of data stored in 4.4 million files, or an average of 37K per message. Most other products I've tried (both commercial and open source) have not been too happy with this arrangement and end up requiring vast amounts of disk space and overhead to index this kind of mail spool.

Does anyone know if bacula is any better with this? If not, I'm thinking my best resort would be to have each user's mail spool gzipped before backing it up (we don't restore individual emails for users, so this kind of "resolution" is sufficient for us). Any ideas on a good way of doing this that won't require me to run an external crob job to do the zipping and require almost twice the disk space?

Don't know why others are complaining, but I have 2 servers I back up
Maildirs from.  One using rsync (my personal server) and the server here
at work.  Here we use Bacula to catch all our Maildirs.

Theoretically, Maildir should protect you from inconsistencies.  Worst
case scenerio, a few emails here and there get backed up corrupted, but
the rest of the Maildir will be fine.  I've never heard of anyone having
problems in practice, and we've done a few test restores of Maildirs here
with perfect success.

Our mail server is rather small: 2.8G of emails total, a little less than
70,000 mails.  A full backup only takes 8 minutes, and incrementals usually
take about 10 seconds.  I guess our average mail size is about the same
as yours.  If Bacula scales linearly, you'd be looking at 8 hours for a
full backup and 10 minutes for daily incrementals.

HTH.


There is another option. While looking at making backups of our mailstore (40gb of Maildirs on NFS) we are considering doing archiving instead. Have the mailserver write each message to another mailstore/server. Purge on a expire date.

The option of having an archive of all mail available for a determined time period is something clients have been requesting for some time now. We are looking at archiving everything, inbound and outbound. Then selling a web access to the archive for clients that wish it or clients whose lawyers are making it mandatory. Of course the archived mail store would always be available to you for recovery purposes.

Just a thought.

DAve

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