Greetings All,
I am looking for the best way to do online/offsite, automated, nightly,
incremental file backup for my mail server.
This is admittedly a tangential topic, but I know the users here will
have good insights (or at least send me in the right direction). Hoping
for maybe 5 recommendations then the thread can be closed. When a Google
around for backup/postfix I get discussions on backup *MX* servers instead.
I'm currently backing up my Quad core Intel Xeon/Linux 2.6.18 32
bit/Postfix 2.8/Dovecot 2.0 server with JungleDisk Server Edition 3.16
(latest version). JD is somewhat rough around the edges, generating
thousands of errors per backup because the index it builds includes all
of the dynamic files (inbox items, postfix queue items) that are no
longer there when the indexing finishes and the actual backup begins. I
could exclude the postfix queue itself but the mailboxes remain (MailDir
style, so probably a million total files there.) Further JD generates
long strange error messages and needs to be restarted manually
sometimes. Finally it takes 123 hours to incrementally backup 135GB over
the network. Not exactly what lets a sysadmin sleep at night.
I was wondering what data backup systems people use? The case of a mail
server where thousands of files are quickly appearing and disappearing
every hour is somewhat different than a user file server where large
documents change more gradually. This is a dedicated, rented, remote,
rack-mounted server so I don't have control to do some kind of clever
RAID or fiber-SAN setup. Is a simple rsync just better? It would be nice
to have daily or bi-daily incremental snapshots a la Apple Time Machine,
going back a few months.
Thanks,
-Daniel
- good data backup system for a mail server? Daniel Bromberg
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