On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:00:52AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > However, backing up an IMAP mail store daily leaves a lot to be > desired. Most likely time for someone to accidentally delete the > important mail they have been waiting for is probably not too long > after it arrives. Depending (mostly) on the number of messages in > your mail store, you may be able to run an rsync of the maildir > hourly or maybe even every 15 minutes to another local hard disk. > You could make that rsync cumulative -- no removing of deleted > files, then daily rsync that backup off to another machine (using > --link-dest option for a quick, rotated backup), and then doing an > rsync WITH deletion to your local system, so your backup store > doesn't grow without bound.
This sounds like a job for rsnapshot: essentailly point-in-time snapshots on top of rsync, using hard links of unchanged files for space and speed. With some additional shell scripting + cron you could have a really nice scheme to keep 15 minute snaps for the last few days, then daily for a while, then weekly. -- http://code.phxbsd.com/
