On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 01:51:05AM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>
> I'm mainly wondering if it's common for backup programs to support using a
> separate program to generate the backups. For example if there was a
> "dovecot-backup" binary that just dumps all (or new-since-last-backup) of the
> users' mails into stdout, which the backup program can use. Or perhaps in
> that case there wouldn't really be much of anything for the backup to do
> except to write it to tape..
I know at least tivoli storage manager (TSM) should be able to handle
such lists. AFAIK this is how GPFS's "mmbackup" utility works. It
utilizes a fast inode scan API to find all candidate files, and will be
much more efficient than a normal backup client that traverses the whole
fs.
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21305169
But in addition to new-since-last-backup, we would probably also need a
deleted-since-last-backup feature.
-jf
